As someone who has had multiple series sniped from them, after saying I was going to be translating them, I can answer this. While it may seem silly, seeing someone else release a chapter ahead of you and people flocking to it can make a translator feel rather shite. It’s like “why bother translating the series when someone else is doing it”. It saps one’s desire to TL a series. Btw one of the snipers stopped TLing after 2 chapters cause it blew up in their face.
It was a rhetorical question. As someone who's TL'd before, I've been happy when someone faster than me came along, as long as they were just as good (if they were worse I'd be even happier cuz bragging rights).
Believe it or not, the way you guys do it was originally the rarity. I personally believe Red Hawk Scans(or maybe Mangastream) was responsible for the complete overhaul of the way people do scans...which is sort of a good thing, but the feeling you're telling me about is the catch. You don't know how to deal with other people scanning besides you.
Literally around 5 scans of the same chapter might have been available for some series any given week. Back in that day we had speed scans, forum-specific scans, blog scans and IRC scans...and THEN the people who actually took their time, likely having their own website and dedicated staff(like Red Hawk or Mangastream).
You guys have gotten so used to a clean scan situation that your immune system took a dive.