Oh I know that it all existed before, I am just commenting on how prevalent it is and how much it is built in by design.
To be honest I think you are slightly out of date in thinking torrent sites are just the 'retail' level. The majority of pre retail releases of movies (CAM/R5/Screener/HDTV etc) these days are done by p2p groups. A huge amount of pre release leaks of bluray disks come from Chinese bittorrent sites. A huge proportion of games get uploaded to p2p sites before getting pred and many games are cracked by p2p groups before the scene groups get to them (with several notable cases of scene groups 'stealing' p2p releases).
The one area where I feel like the scene could be said to be in a different league is in preing TV, but even that is slipping with p2p groups uploading full .ts streams and itunes rips.
To be honest I think you are slightly out of date in thinking torrent sites are just the 'retail' level. The majority of pre retail releases of movies (CAM/R5/Screener/HDTV etc) these days are done by p2p groups. A huge amount of pre release leaks of bluray disks come from Chinese bittorrent sites. A huge proportion of games get uploaded to p2p sites before getting pred and many games are cracked by p2p groups before the scene groups get to them (with several notable cases of scene groups 'stealing' p2p releases).
The one area where I feel like the scene could be said to be in a different league is in preing TV, but even that is slipping with p2p groups uploading full .ts streams and itunes rips.