Can someone explain to me how to make Flexget not suck, please? I made the mistake of upgrading from 1.0.something to 1.1.165 and everything went to hell.

Simplified, I have:

tasks:
  tvtorrents:
    rss: ...
    all_series:
      path: ~/Movies/Torrents/%(series_name)s/
    series:
      - The Daily Show

and tonight's Daily Show torrent showed up in "Torrents/" instead of in "Torrents/The Daily Show/". This used to work before.

The torrent's actual name is "The.Daily.Show.2013.12.09.Husain.Haqqani.HDTV.x264-BATV.mp4". The debug log shows the words "series_name: The Daily Show" in several places.

Bonus points if you can tell me how to remove "The" from the beginning of every subdirectory name, because I'm one of those crazy people who believes that you don't alphabetize things that begin with "The" under "T". I have tried all of these and none work:

# "Could not set path for FILE: (UndefinedError) 'path' is undefined"
# "FILE: (UndefinedError) 'path' is undefined"
# Lands in ~/Torrents/, not the subdir
    series:
      - The Daily Show:
          set:
            path: "{{path|replace('/The ','/')}}"

# Remains "UNDECIDED"
    series:
      - The Daily Show:
          set:
            series_name: 'Daily Show'

# Remains "UNDECIDED"
    series:
      - (The) Daily Show:
          set:
            series_name: 'Daily Show'

# Lands in ~/Torrents/, not the subdir
    series:
      - (The) Daily Show

# "The key `set` is not valid here."
    series:
      set:
        path: "{{ path|replace('/The ', '/') }}"

# "[/transmission/path] `` does not exist"
    transmission:
      path: "{{ path|replace('/The ', '/') }}"

# Lands in ~/Torrents/, not the subdir
    all_series:
      set:
        path: "{{ path|replace('/The ', '/') }}"

The only incantation that I know of that comes even close to producing debugging output for this bullshit asstastic piece of shit is "flexget -v --debug --debug-trace --inject filename" -- is there some better way to get it to tell you what the fuck it thinks it's doing?

The fact that these rules appear to fire in a completely random order is... well, is firmly among the worst things about it.

Update: After a week of trial and error, this is the only thing I was able to come up with that works:

tasks:

  tvtorrents:
    rss: https://...

    all_series:
      timeframe: 1 hours
      target: 720p+
      propers: no
      specials: no
      path: "~/Movies/Torrents/{{series_name}}"

    series:

      # Specify explicit path for any shows beginning with "The".
      # I can't find any more general way to do this kind of rewrite.
      # There's no way to do "s/^The //" using {{variables}} or
      # using "set" or using "manipulate" in either "series",
      # "all_series" or "transmission".  The one and only way is
      # to specify the full path name each time here.

      - The Daily Show:
          path: "~/Movies/Torrents/Daily Show"

      - The Colbert Report:
          path: "~/Movies/Torrents/Colbert Report"

      - Marvel's Agents Of S H I E L D:
          path: "~/Movies/Torrents/Agents of SHIELD"

      # Specify explicit capitalization, and trim some titles to a
      # leading substring.  This only does prefix matches.  If you
      # want to omit words from the front, do it as above.

      - Archer
      - Doctor Who

    transmission:
      removewhendone: true

    retry_failed:
      retry_time: 15 minutes
      retry_time_multiplier: 1.5
      max_retries: 20