[tiluha]

Finding peers is somewhat slow. When downloading via torrent it takes a while to really ramp up in speed. With a centralized repository you can start downloading basically right away. For many small files the latency is more important than the bandwidth, given that most repositories are not short on bandwitdth.

[strangesmells02]

That seems easy to work around. You could write it in such a way that it would have a live cache of peers ready to go plus also the centralized peers would always be available.

I personally suspect that having centralized repos is a legacy technology from pre-torrent days when also disk wasnt cheap.