@MrMazda I apologize for the insistence but your answer to my message regarding to padding files is outdated, I am reaching out because I think what you're doing is harming the community, even if trying to help.
What you said about padding files being tied to specific clients, and those files being actually downloaded, was the case in the past. This happened before the existence of Bittorrent v2 protocol. This protocol was first introduced only years ago in 2020. Surely padding files were a thing long before that, following what you have said: each client had their own interpretation and there was no overall compatibility between different clients.
Those torrents, despite having padding information, were not v2 or hybrid, they used Bittorrent v1 protocol (as v2 still didn't exist). V1-only torrents should never have padding information. So in this sense, if you can tell a torrent is not v2/hybrid and has those padding files, you are correct in removing them.
Bittorrent v2 is a totally different implementation, it is not any client's own interpretation but rather it is a direct implementetion right into the bittorrent protocol itself. Hybrid torrents fall back to Bittorrent v1 protocol (without padding) if the user's client isn't compatible with v2. Meaning Hybrid torrents are backwards compatible with any torrent client.
For instance, qBittorrent has 2 main versions, one using Libtorrent 1.2 and another using Libtorrent 2.0. You can make a hybrid torrent using LT 2.0 version and it will be backwards compatible with any torrent client. As a matter of fact most QT users use the regular LT 1.2 version, so the hybrid torrents will always fall back to v1 protocol for them.
Bittorrent v2 protocol has performance issues and adoption has been very slow (granted it's only 6 years old) but hybrid torrents can still be used by any torrent client. When a hybrid torrent is loaded in a v1-only client it will not use the new sha-256 hash tree for individual files, but the regular sha-1 hash tree which does not include any padding information.
When the tracker reports a size that is bigger than the size of all files, but the torrent client reports a smaller file... That is a hybrid torrent, it's not inflating any number and is not transferring any garbage file.
As for the tracker, what should happen is that, when a torrent is flagged as hybrid, it should ignore the padding files from the total size and hide them from the file list, and only delete torrents that contain padding files but are not hybrid.



PS: I was gonna send a PM but it was too long.