MaM is a bit bizarre. But I think it mostly boils down to the open interview process. Since lots of users can easily join it can cause headaches if not managed well. Especially since they have a notable invite forum lots of people will use it as a stepping stone possibly to create multiple accounts on “upstream” trackers through the invite forums. This creates a lot of burden on the staff.

• IP requirements are mostly to avoid duplicate accounts and ban evasion.
• Torrent client requirements are mostly to make cheating harder, but also help reduce support load by banning buggy clients.
• Strict IP seeding rules help mitigate damage from less knowledgeable users leaking their passkey.
• MaM is also quite old and does have a handful of what I would consider “annoying legacy” but I don’t think any of it is about elitism.
• The mobile bans are because few mobile clients are good seeders (often online and connectable). This raises support load hugely.

Basically I don’t envy the moderators and other staff on MaM. There are tons of relatively inexperienced users “passing through” and they are a big abuse target. So they make strict rules to make policing this easier.

At the end of the day if you don’t like it you can not use it. They don’t owe you anything.

It is definitely slow, but once you get quite a bit of stuff it isn’t that bad. But if you want to easier economy just go for OPS.

What does that mean?

• https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html
• https://interview.orpheus.network/

The pirates just can’t keep up.

You should check out private music trackers. The pirates are literally racing to get new releases up there. Maybe they aren’t quite as complete as some music services but I think it would be hard to argue that they aren’t keeping up.