@mr_smartepants... I feel your pain too, But, regarding the "for you to DEMAND" comment, he did say please.
I worked for the phone company. The desktop support group was a unit of several dozen people who supported over 5k desktops, and we were admins, However, we did not have full access to the network, that was a different department, and I can assure you they would not have allowed us torrent downloads... period. On the other hand they could easily afford to pay the bill for us to provide the direct downloads year in and year out. They may have even supplied the server to use for this at no cost to the project. In that situation it would be a good investment to support us. The cost of supporting us would be far less than the increased cost of supporting 5000 desktops without us.
If not having direct downloads gets you fired up, do something about it. Sounds like you work for an organization that has the resources to be able to help. So rather than complaining and compounding the problem, become part of the solution.
Our bandwidth routinely exceeds 10TB a month... no free options to handle that kind of bandwidth.
We are considering a pay for option for our users that would have CDN downloads. We haven't had much interest expressed in that option to date. As always everyone wants something for nothing... Ask for a little money and people act like you ran over their cat. Torrents cost very little and that is what our user base is willing to pay. If you would be interested in or willing to donate for direct downloads this is your opportunity to say so .
Direct downloads would cost us well over 1000 USD a month based on 10~20 TB, We were fortunate in the past to have that donated, but we can not expect that to always be an option. Direct downloads are preferred by us as well as you but we simply can't, our revenue stream does not exist. The cost of one month of direct downloads would far exceed the combined total of all donations received over the past two years .
the short version is:
10~20 terabytes of traffic a month costs a huge amount of money...
Nobody ever donates any money.
Torrents are free, and that is what we can afford based on the donations we receive.
Thanks for being such a big fan of our project. We like that .
Thanks for taking the time to post and welcome to DriverPacks.net forum.
summary, Does this get you fired up? Then do something about it... The ball is in your court.