I always hated ripping stuff myself because I could never decide on a good ratio between file size and quality. So I just stuck with what scene groups released. Rips from final blurays/dvds were usually good enough. Although I haven't bothered torrenting anything in many years. There just isn't enough worth keeping these days.

keeping ones downloaded backups up to date in this age of perpetual patches is a bit of a pain in the ass.

Yea that's fucking annoying. IIRC GoG displays a green dot on games in your library that had an update after you downloaded it. On steam the only way I found to see which of your games got updated is going through the "recently updated" page. At least they now go back more than a couple of weeks.