For the longest time, xvid was the standard for these guys. They still have standards requiring that all releases be packaged into multipart RAR files, "in 15, 20, or multiples of 50 MB". In other words, they are kind of inflexible and hidebound.
Anime fansubbing groups, in contrast, have no common standards except for -- to paraphrase the IETF motto -- rough consensus and regular releases. If some group wants to encode with Hi10P to get the same video quality at 2/3 the file size, they don't have to ask permission from anyone. Competition between groups gradually pushes forward the rough consensus, which is how they switched from xvid to x264, from container formats like AVI to the more flexible MKV, from SD to HD, and so on. The freedom to not live up to a community standard of quality gave them the ability to exceed it.
I remember reading years ago (possibly on Wikipedia's Scene article) that the multipart RAR thing was for faster distribution among the network of servers: Other servers can start downloading parts before the current server has finished fetching everything.
There's many layers of hierarchy (from the release groups themselves down to the hoopleheads at the bottom) so it speeds up releases significantly.
Internal scene transfer was (and still is, afaik) done using FTP servers, often very primitive ones because they had to evade detection on hacked servers. When you're racing a large game or movie from one server to another, the last thing you want is for a random disconnect to ruin it 90% of the way through, or even worse, to finish it and find that the CRCs don't match because of random corruption. It also means that you can race from multiple sources for higher speed, and like you said, use a server as a source before it's actually done downloading.
First of all no "pro courier" is going to be on HN bragging about his "weapons of choice." Second of all FXP was the protocol of choice back in the day(the time period the parent post was referring to). Thirdly, I remember when telix and minicom where "the weapons of choice."
Autotrading with pftp was a great way to get banned when I came up in the scene. ssh + standard unix ftp and a screen rotation of ~5-10 sites were the usual trading setup. It's much nicer than FXP, particularly as most top sites only allowed a few logins. You simultaneously mget different files from all affil sites and mput to the rest of your rotation. Chaining with FXP just isn't fast enough.
Autotrading will still get you banned. But yeah what you describe sounds like it's from back in the day. Nowadays there are three modes with the standard pftp: autotrade, autotrade only while at computer (redundant, I know), and manual trade.
But chaining with FXP is just fine now (virtually all courier groups do it with the exception of 0day). When I was a courier our pftp coordinated with the other ones in the group and chained them via country, ranking, and by 3-4 other factors I can get into if you'd like.
Are the site rankings published anywhere? When I came up we had e-zines like the Netmonkey Weekly Report. Damn they were cool! :)
FWIW: I traded 0sec to places like: Falsehood, Hades, VDRLake, Firesite, Enigma, Etirnity (whose dutch admins couldn't spell, but their site owned anyway :p) and, my favourite, Stairway to Heaven.
Anime fansubbing groups, in contrast, have no common standards except for -- to paraphrase the IETF motto -- rough consensus and regular releases. If some group wants to encode with Hi10P to get the same video quality at 2/3 the file size, they don't have to ask permission from anyone. Competition between groups gradually pushes forward the rough consensus, which is how they switched from xvid to x264, from container formats like AVI to the more flexible MKV, from SD to HD, and so on. The freedom to not live up to a community standard of quality gave them the ability to exceed it.
There's probably a broader lesson in all this.