It be nice if some private trackers offered a forum section, similar to invite section, that offered advertising these behind a certain rank.

I'm on one that is, behind a PT that you have to like apply and get into after a certain rank on the tracker.

Yeah like others mentioned, I would strongly advise against doing this. Will probably get scammed or cabal banned at worst too.

But my advice if you have the money to spend and want to just easy access, look at the donation signups that Brickfrog mentioned.

In particular, I think TL, PHD, HDT, AvistaZ, and CinemaZ are worth while to donate and join.

I have found other services like Tidal aren't as advanced with their DRM it seems, I'm able to download using some command line CLI off github full FLACs and everything.

For remuxes I find BLU internals (WiLDCAT, BLURANiUM, CONSORTiUM, PmP etc) to be solid. I find a lot of them really go the extra mile and make a definitive remux with best video qualities, audio qualities, subtitles, chapters etc. They aren't really racing for the fastest release but building quality remuxes.

As far as like remuxers that race to do the latest releases, CiNEPHiLES, EPSiLON, FraMeSToR, KRaLiMaRKo, TRiToN, and LEGi0N I'd prefer in that order I'd say...but they often are just aiming to do a plain one source remux from a single blu-ray and not much else. Some opting for custom discs or make mistakes with bad DV layers etc.

I think above all else. BLU does a really good job of curating the best remuxes possible. They have a few individual users who do great remuxes but aren't like big groups...and a whole program where they mark ones as BLURANiUM approved.

For WEB-DL HONE and FLUX I think are the best that are active. NTb often won't do a hybrid DV HDR release and it's annoying. HONE is also great because they do H.265 for 1080p. Otherwise most are fine really...

For movie encodes, I typically will just grab the 1080p HDR encodes that are available or otherwise just a 1080p x264. Lot of the HDB and BHD internals basically here, the Aither internals are good too...but lot of the time I do it myself from a good remux!

I often grab re-encodes for older TV series with way too many episodes and I don't care about quality as much in particular. QxR, TAoE, EDGE2020, Vyndros, YAWNiX, iVy are good in my book.

It's certainly alive and exists.

But access to music is easy and affordable. It's more inconvenient for me to pirate it than just use a streaming service.

I also listen to a lot of independent artists and rather buy their stuff to support them.

Curiosity Stream, Nebula, Tidal, Soundcloud, Spotify, Prime, and a Plex share basically.