I too appreciate a well edited MTL because even if its MTL'd if the person editing it is fluent in English they can at least go over the output and realize where things don't make sense and fix it. However, the problem with this is two-fold.
One is that for the vast majority of MTL the fan translator puts in a minimal amount of effort so its unreadble garbage more often than not. Often times the mistakes are so insanely obvious you wonder if they proofread it at all before hitting upload.
The other problem is that by putting out a half assed chapter, that chapter will now be shitty for the rest of time because even if a more decent translator picks up a series down the road, they will often not go back and fix the hot mess that the other translator left the earlier chapters in, because its considered bad manners to "snipe" as you said. in fact many places like novelupdates enforce a retarded no sniping policy.
I recall a decade ago or so it was the wild west when it came to translations but somewhere along the way they realized it could be monitized out the ass with almost 0 effort and they somehow made it like a soulless corporate machine, complete with the corporate greed, but somehow without the corporation.
Right, those are issues for sure. But as someone who reads really obscure shit (thanks JUM for everything you do!), often times its absolutely never going to have any other option, so I can compromise in that regard.
And one silver lining is, that if its bad enough both those problems will be rectified because its still a fan run community, at least for bigger series. For example, a few years back the manga for Jashin Dropkick was releasing at a snail's pace and was something like 200+ chapters behind the raws. So a guy just released the bottom barrel MTX at a rate of a new chapter every 20 minutes, and got caught up within a few weeks.
It being so bad made people pick it up to keep pumping out half decent quality works for those who were patient enough, and for those who wanted to be caught up with Japan for spoilers (what little there could be) they now were up to date and just needed a second scanlator to jump in at the further place.
But maybe the situation is worse than I think, due to my aforementioned mostly only obscure reading habits. I rarely run into any groups who are big on monetization or any of the problems you laid out (other than the retarded sniping shit). The only time I saw it was Jamini's Box with Kaguya, who were so hated that when they shut down it became a meme for everyone to scanlate the next chapter to celebrate their death, which is why chapter 200 has dozens of versions.
I too appreciate a well edited MTL because even if its MTL'd if the person editing it is fluent in English they can at least go over the output and realize where things don't make sense and fix it. However, the problem with this is two-fold.
One is that for the vast majority of MTL the fan translator puts in a minimal amount of effort so its unreadble garbage more often than not. Often times the mistakes are so insanely obvious you wonder if they proofread it at all before hitting upload.
The other problem is that by putting out a half assed chapter, that chapter will now be shitty for the rest of time because even if a more decent translator picks up a series down the road, they will often not go back and fix the hot mess that the other translator left the earlier chapters in, because its considered bad manners to "snipe" as you said. in fact many places like novelupdates enforce a retarded no sniping policy.
I recall a decade ago or so it was the wild west when it came to translations but somewhere along the way they realized it could be monitized out the ass with almost 0 effort and they somehow made it like a soulless corporate machine, complete with the corporate greed, but somehow without the corporation.
Right, those are issues for sure. But as someone who reads really obscure shit (thanks JUM for everything you do!), often times its absolutely never going to have any other option, so I can compromise in that regard.
And one silver lining is, that if its bad enough both those problems will be rectified because its still a fan run community, at least for bigger series. For example, a few years back the manga for Jashin Dropkick was releasing at a snail's pace and was something like 200+ chapters behind the raws. So a guy just released the bottom barrel MTX at a rate of a new chapter every 20 minutes, and got caught up within a few weeks.
It being so bad made people pick it up to keep pumping out half decent quality works for those who were patient enough, and for those who wanted to be caught up with Japan for spoilers (what little there could be) they now were up to date and just needed a second scanlator to jump in at the further place.
But maybe the situation is worse than I think, due to my aforementioned mostly only obscure reading habits. I rarely run into any groups who are big on monetization or any of the problems you laid out (other than the retarded sniping shit). The only time I saw it was Jamini's Box with Kaguya, who were so hated that when they shut down it became a meme for everyone to scanlate the next chapter to celebrate their death, which is why chapter 200 has dozens of versions.