In the old torrent days I was only watching classical masterpieces and top level world directors. In the streaming era I only watch mediocre straight-to-streaming movies, few popular TV series and too much reality TV that I'm not proud to watch.
Realistically you don't absolutely need a VPS to run your own tunnel through for bittorrent. You can do something like install a virtualbox machine that mounts your local samba file share across the LAN (to store downloaded stuff), and otherwise has a default route outbound to the world through a $5/mo VPN that exits to the Internet in like, Chișinău Moldova. Or similar.
The main thing to worry about is using a bittorrent client that knows to 'stop' immediately if it's no longer on the VPN.