Perhaps also interesting, before using showRSS I was using TVshowsApp (http://tvshowsapp.com/).
Something I'm missing from showRSS btw, is the ability to browse trough all episodes/seasons and be able to select an episode/season to be added to the RSS-queue, so my downloading box would fetch it next time it checks the feed. But than, showRSS does one thing very well, so I'm not sure more features like that would be helpful for everyone.
It does what it does pretty well, though. The new system reads a few sources (not just EZTV) and picks the best releases. So, 720p for everyone in a matter of hours and for almost every show you can think of.
P.S: have you thought about using transmission+dyndns? It's how I run it (minidlna+transmission, and showRSS pushes to my rasppi, no RSS involved!).
minidlna seems like something I'm going to be looking into, thanks! And for dns, I use a domain which I manage using cloudflare and a script [1] which gets run by cron and updates the cloudflare entry every day or so. Didn't wrote the script though, found it somewhere and had to edit it a bit to work again.
Something else I have been looking into is splitting up the load, using the RPi only for streaming and xbmc; and handling downloading and NAS capabilities using a different device, such as a MIKROTIK RouterBOARD (which I'm afraid isn't going to work).