Even though my two cents aren't particularly valuable, I figured I'd add them anyway. IMO at least one XviD/DivX release should be retained for every series regardless of its comparable quality to other releases, simply because not everyone has the ability to deal with the Matroska container and not everyone has a powerful enough machine to decode H.264/AVC at full speed. You would definitely have to have a pretty bad machine to be unable to play back 640x480 files in H.264, but I think it's a bit unreasonable to assume that every anime viewer who uses this site has a machine capable of using the newer formats. I'm still watching anime on my Pentium 4, and I had to pay for CoreAVC to get enough performance to play back 720p files. Unfortunately, libavcodec has terrible performance unless you have a machine sufficiently overpowered to overcome its weaknesses. Most likely a Pentium 3 or worse would be necessary for you to be unable to play SD releases in H.264 format, but I for one think that it is worthwhile to maintain compatibility as well as promote quality. I don't think it would be majorly confusing to have a category E for "here's a XviD version if your computer sucks" content.
Unfortunately, having access to the highest quality versions doesn't do people much good if they can't actually play those files back. I'm by no means against re-organizing the categories, but in the interest of making the site's content useful to the widest audience possible, I think that complete codec neutrality will be detrimental to the site's usefulness. As others have said, since it's up to the users to keep Torrents seeded, there wouldn't be any harm or drain on BakaBT's resources to preserve at least one MPEG-4 Part 2 release for everything, and since the staff is going to the trouble of re-organizing everything anyway, I'm sure there's a way to do it without being obtrusive or confusing.
On a completely unrelated note...
Does this mean that B or C releases will finally receive free leech if an A release isn't available?
