And allow them on some playlists

I also don’t get this fear. Assuming you aren’t blindly exposing your entire filesystem or opening tons of ports what is the risk?

Thought about doing something very similar, I’ll be curious to hear the feedback and your experience

Maybe just me but I’d rather the industry just evolve or die than be forced to listen to ads.

I love Usenet but it does incur a cost whereas torrenting can be totally free. If I were in your position I’d definitely also be curious to track down the discrepancy since it would nag at me that there’s something I should be able to achieve there that I’m missing. If you haven’t picked through the manual searches to see what’s being found but not grabbed definitely start there as its very likely that some content is filtered out at that stage.

Usenet makes finding new content much more reliable, but if you prefer to keep it to torrents, I think your approach makes sense and should help you plug the gap in theory. Something fell through the cracks somewhere in your investigation - stremio found the content, you followed those links back to their trackers, added them to your prowlarr, and you get nothing - but why? Maybe you didn’t find the actual source, and need to go back and look into that more. I can’t offer any advice there.

Your *arr stack could be finding the content in the indexers but not grabbing it due to some filters or rules. This is common for me. It could be outside of the filesize threshold for the given quality or something like that, in which case you just need to change your quality settings. I would definitely do manual interactive searches and pour through the results.

If you have a specific example of content your setup isn’t finding, I could try a manual search and let you know if and where it turns up on my setup.

Can you give some examples of the bloat?