That whole survival crafting genre seems very hit or miss to me, and I've noticed that people liking one game in the genre is a very poor predictor of whether they'll like another one. Subnautica, Don't Starve, Minecraft, and Ark are all theoretically the same genre but very different games.
However I've also seen a lot of people say that Subnautica was the one that clicked for them. I think the story and progression was big for a lot of people.
It's scene stuff, probably taken from usenet. They use it there because files are often incompete and you want smaller chunks for parity purposes. There's no real advantage for torrents.