Torrents have a disadvantage in that their longevity depends on the desires of the peers to seed. If no one seeds, the torrent dies. Torrents aren't stable for the same reason: the peers have to be willing to send the data if they have it, and not all are willing. Even magnet links aren't perfect. They take away the tracker and thus completely decentralize the process, but it's still subject to the desires of the peers.

JDownloader will pull from these sites even if you only have free access. It will take longer because you still have to wait for X minutes between sections, but will download. Plus JDownloader works around the bandwidth limitation these sites toss up to encourage people to get memberships. Lastly, the information is stored on a server, and thus is always available for someone to download.

For a lot of the stuff I download, I search on Filestube for it first before looking for it on a torrent.