Mostly I wanted to learn about databases and I was bored one day so...
I kind of like transmission, had it doing its thing on my low-power NAS for a couple years with zero problems. The thing with duplicates was the rss feed sending ~7 days of shows and needing a way for my python script to tell if it had already seen an item or not so I was just dumping them into a log file and searching through it on the next run -- crazy inefficient but it did the job.