I'll start: it wasn't too long ago that one wasn't expected to pay out of one's coked up nose for programs (apps). One used to be able to buy a thing and then own the thing. Vacuum cleaners. Video games. Photoshops. Now one has to sign up for it, enter one's credit card info and fucking pay monthly for some harebrained "service."
And I blame all of you. Probably 9/10ths of you are on apple products and/or are locked into absolutely insane digital ecosystems and you all laid down and took it. All of you fucking libs. You took it, you normalized it, and fuck all of you.
It is faster in practice though. Negligible for single files, sure, but think about a whole season of TV; It'll torrent 100GB to the box in a minute or two, at which point I can immediately start streaming it to my local device, without having to complete a download to it first. If I were to torrent that season to my device directly, I'd have to wait until an entire episode has finished torrenting before starting playback.
Also I'm sharing the box with a few friends, so it ends up costing me only about five bucks a month anyway.