As best I can tell, whomever designed the scripting system for rtorrent did so in a manner contrived to make it as hard to use as possible.  It seems that = is the function application operator, and precedence is stated by using a few levels of distinct escaping. For example:

# Define a method 'tnadm_complete', which executes 'baz' if both 'foo' and 'bar' return true.
system.method.insert=tnadm_complete,simple,branch={and="foo=,bar=",baz=}

With somewhat more sane design, it might look more like this:

system.method.insert(tnadm_complete, simple, branch(and(foo(),bar()),baz()))

That still doesn’t help the data-type ambiguity problems (’tnadm_complete’ is a string here, but not obviously so), but it’s a bit better in readability. I haven’t tested whether the escaping with {} can be nested, but I’m not confident that it can.

In any case, that’s just a short rant since I just spent about two hours wrapping my brain around it. Hopefully that work turns into some progress on a new project concept, otherwise it was mostly a waste. As far as the divergence meter goes, I’m currently debugging a lack of communication between my in-circuit programmer and the microcontroller.

Incidentally, the rtorrent community wiki is a rather incomplete but still useful reference for this sort of thing, while gi-torrent provides a reasonably-organized overview of the XMLRPC methods available (which appear to be what the scripting exposes), and the Arch wiki has a few interesting examples.