I'm not in the scene anymore, but for my own personal encoding, at higher quality settings, AV1 (rav1e or SVT; AOM was crazy slow) doesn't significantly beat out x265 for most sources.
FGS makes a huge difference at moderately high bitrates for movies that are very grainy, but many people seem to really not want it for HQ sources (see sibling comments). With FGS off, it's hard to find any sources that benefit at bitrates that you will torrent rather than stream.
FGS makes a huge difference at moderately high bitrates for movies that are very grainy, but many people seem to really not want it for HQ sources (see sibling comments). With FGS off, it's hard to find any sources that benefit at bitrates that you will torrent rather than stream.