This release is really important if only because it supports BitTorrent V2 spec.
Transmission has a huge market share, particularly in open source circles. Lack of support for the V2 spec has stopped many open source projects from migrating their torrents to the V2 spec, because transmission clients won't work.
Please support and use other open-source torrent clients, because Transmission's long-standing history of going years between updates and their significant market share simply is not healthy.
The protocol should be able to find same files in other torrents - you could be downloading a bunch of files (like a season of TV), but are able to find and download one file from another torrent that is better seeded (like one single episode torrent). But I don't think any of the clients implement that yet.
There are lots of changes that are nice-to-have efficiency improvements.
But there are no new killer features. I would guess that the extra user headaches from having outdated software not work with new torrents will exceed the benefits of slightly faster downloads and slightly better availability.
Transmission has a huge market share, particularly in open source circles. Lack of support for the V2 spec has stopped many open source projects from migrating their torrents to the V2 spec, because transmission clients won't work.
Please support and use other open-source torrent clients, because Transmission's long-standing history of going years between updates and their significant market share simply is not healthy.
The first client to support v2 spec was two years ago; same year the libtorrent library that some clients use supported v2: https://torrentfreak.com/biglybt-is-the-first-torrent-client...