The only difference between public and private trackers is availability and quality. You should have a VPN always enabled (through the closest locale if you like, for speed) or a seedbox which is even better than a VPN. If public trackers have what you want, there's zero reason not to use them.

When I was back on IPT, I found one of the top software uploaders binding a fully undetectable backdoor downloader to his downloads. Never in the installer or anything, always bound to the main software file and could be unbound after install and activation. Always showed 0/50 on virustotal etc. Since I was somewhat into malware analysis at the time, I tried to do some analysis on it but of course it would detect my analysis of it and just not run. Whereas if I ran the software on an old PC, it would do it's thing and I could detect it after the fact, but still not get very far.

I used a lot of software from that guy previously. Who knows what keys to the kingdom he has.