I only now read that answer from gmaxwell:
We used to; but since 0.10 the blockchain is now download in parallel and verified concurrently. Using the seperate download, even via bittorrent, then loading it is now usually slower than just syncing directly.
I wonder how much this speeds up the downloading. And were the limits raised too?
Anyway... there are many complaints about 0.10.xx that it crashes and things like redownloading and reindexing and so on happens all the time. I don't know if that is fixed already.