Takeaway points for you.
An offer would have been made to reinstate the subtitle, retail or not, as a good will gesture, but in the end was declined due to SPAM/Advertising in the middle of the sub. So in the end this isn't about retail vs transcripts, as a compromise would have been possible.
Transcripts do exist.
Aladdin:
https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/subtit ... aladdin-en
That subtitle has 1.4 million downloads, do you seriously think the now defunct website you mentioned had that level of traffic for that one subtitle? Wasn't the reason of its demise lack of traffic? That same subtitle probably had 10-20k downloads on the other site?
https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/statistics:
Just one user in this list, hadilan, has had his subs downloaded over 10 million times in the past 6 months, do you seriously think his subtitles were downloaded that many times on other websites?
What's my point?
The more traffic, the more users, the more downloads = the more user complaints.
Site admins' actions have mostly been defined by collated years of feedback. What is right for the site and mostly the community at large, this has been determined by talks, debates, discussions, feedback and complaints given over the years by said community. Generally the community has been at the heart of our operation and setup.
If you go through the forum, you can see swathes of topics where users have requested many features and adjustments over the years and our developers have been more than accommodating to engage with the community to get the best out of the website for all users concerned. I don't think there's many, if any, subtitle sites that beats that level of commitment for its users. Not to mention all the apps we and the community have created over the years to get the best out of the website.
We're
OPEN to changes, adjustments and compromises. As long as it benefits the community at large and doesn't contradict past promises and commitments that we know to be detrimental to our users.
Alas, we're only human and can't always please everyone. I'm sure most of our users can agree that we do try our best and we are always there for them when needed.