If downloading files in sequence using BT is considered a bad form, how about changing the priority instead?

"Honestly, I would just ignore people who say things like that; their argument strikes me as silly. The whole point of bittorrent is to let you download a small number of files, or single files, while they're popular, and while other people are downloading. Fundamentally, in terms of making the maximum number of files available from the maximum number of peers, this is a flawed model. It's a clear distinction from previous systems like edonkey, which encouraged everyone to keep their files, and share them. Since others were doing the same, many more files were available per user, and many of those were more rare files, rather than just the most popular ones.

Basically, Bittorrent is a victim of its own success in this regard. Design a system to distribute popular files, and you're going to find that people don't distribute stuff that's no longer popular with them."