TwiddleTwaddle

Megusta is much lower quality than the groups the OP mentioned.

Pretty sure you can still use RED with a VPN though. Its just the IRC server for interviews that requires you use your home connection.

The speedtest requirement is to ensure that you can seed effectively. Its for the overall health of the network not so they can geolocate you. If geolocation was a concern, then your IP would be plenty.

RED is so not a honeypot. Y'all paranoid. If your threat model includes hiding your IP from one of the most respected private trackers in the game, then you should probably stick to public where they don't care if you use a different VPN every time you log in.

Isn't OPS relatively easy to interview in to?

Many of the good private trackers have very active request sections too. Really obscure or old stuff may not be readily available, but with a decent bounty (if required) someone will probably be able to find them for you.

The economy on MAM is mostly points based and you'll generally get very little organic upload. You only need to download some freeleach stuff (or use freeleach tokens) until you're getting enough bonus points hourly to meet your needs. Upload credit is actually very cheap to buy with points and VIP status isn't that expensive either. Plus the community generally donates a ton of points to all new users - even more so if you're at all active on the shoutbox.

If you don't want to donate 5$ to the website you need to wait 4 weeks before you're eligible for VIP, and a lot of content is locked behind VIP. Fortunately though after the 4 week waiting period its very easy to keep VIP all the time. Even easier if you don't want to keep VIP all the time and only need it once or occasionally to download specific content. All VIP content is freeleach to VIPs and locked to VIPs only. This incentivises people to be longstanding active members of the community and not hit and run after grabbing one or two books they were looking for.

You can interview for MyAnonaMouse on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

IPT admins will ban literally anyone for literally any reason, then tell you they'll reinstate your account if you donate. This is their business model and they've been doing it for many many years. Aside from predatory donation fishing, there's a ton of very low quality content on IPT. The kind of stuff that would be banned on any respectable private tracker.

I'm planning on getting some recertified Seagate Ironwolfs from SeverPartDeals very soon

Um.. Its not ironic at all? Mozilla has been active and well regarded in privacy oriented spaces for many years.

I've been using Librera FD. Not sure if it meets all of your needs, but it can be integrated with a Calibre server at least to grab your books from another machine. I haven't bothered to see if it will sync what page you're on though.