It wouldn't be entirely a surprise if it turned out that a majority of users don't like low-quality rips but no one had risked voicing that opinion.

You kidding? We're on the internet. If the majority of people here didn't like them, you'd hear it.

I think the problem is a lot of people are completely misconstruing the motives of both the people encoding these files and the people downloading these encodes.

It doesn't take the most visually-oriented person to see the difference between a high-quality encode and one made to be compact, so I can guarantee you the people who are downloading these and making them know what they look like.

That said, for many of us, quality isn't bottom-line bar-none the most important thing. This is especially true for programming that isn't especially important to us.

What OP is asking is for the uploader of the Supernatural rip, which was 80 gigs, to more than triple the size of that for the sake of quality.

That'd be 240 gigs. For the large chunk of us on Comcast, unfortunately, that's nearly 1/4th of our quota. For me, it's 1/4th of my media drive space.

Many of us are willing to sacrifice quality for that savings. An x265, 1080p encode at 350mb per hour-long episode is certainly less-than-stellar for people who are sticklers for quality, but it's not awful, and it's far preferable for many to bumping up against a bandwidth cap.