It may well be a reflection of single IP downloads counting as one download. Some years ago, we had one well-known person (but possibly others) who chose to manipulate the download counts for his own personal glory and bragging rights. So this was probably a fix to remove that as a factor. This was an issue beyond pure bragging rights, since it probably involved a large drain on the file exchange network bandwidth, with some users making huge numbers of spam downloads for no reason at all.
If you remove the motivation to abuse a resource, then you can effectively remove the problem.
