I'm not sure I totally understood your post. lol I have several audio apps for different purposes either due to their abilities or preference of use for purpose. You can pay reasonable money for a good audio editor. But Audacity is free & does much of what the pro apps can do. It's somewhat slower, but heh it's free.

If you're searching for audio material that's not in common supply then you get what you can, even if that means a copy made off tape or vinyl, or low quality encoded mp3's. Some people use very old comp's with very small HDD's just for the purpose of P2P. So with limited space they encode accordingly to share whilst not running out of space. As for the the other people who offer poor/low quality encoding ... ???? Attitude possibly. They take gold but give copper or tin in return. But for some it's perhaps the best they can give/offer.