[derefr]

Once you've discovered a torrent being seeded, is there no way to interrogate the seeders and/or the DHT itself, to find out the oldest active seeder registration on that torrent hash; and then use the time-of-oldest-observed-registration to rank torrents that claim to be "the same thing" in their metadata, but which have different piece-trie-hash-root?

I ask, because a similar heuristic is used in crypto wallet software, visibility-weighting the various "versions" of a crypto token with the same metadata, by (in part) which were oldest-created. (The logic being: scam clones of a thing need to first observe the real thing, before they can clone it. So the real thing will always come first.)

Of course, I'm assuming here that you're searching for an "expected to exist" release of a thing by a specific distributor, where the distributor has a known-to-you structured naming scheme to the files in their releases, and so you'll only be trying to rank "versions" of the torrent that all have identical names under this naming scheme, save for e.g. the [hash] part of the file name being different to match the content. This won't help if you're trying to find e.g. "X song by Y artist, by any distributor."