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I'm not so sure it's hurting anything.
The URL's working with text after the ID is definitely by design, it's not a bug. The url's internally on the site, such as the ones you get when you use the search interface or add a link into one of their forum posts using that search (an entirely different one to the main site search), are constructed by contatenating/truncating the title something similar to how Calibre shortens titles on save to disk. You can see them changing when you edit a book title (or, since Authors work the same way, if you edit an author name on the site.) It's been that way for years too, and is unlikely to be changing .
Secondly, if the GR plugin was truly being a good citizen, it'd be using the API, not scraping.
The API certainly has rate limits set (And doesn't the UI stop you pulling up more than 50 books at a time in some circumstances? It's been a very long time since I had 50 books to add metadata too, so I may be misremembering.)
I think, since Calibre is already being a bit of a dandy highwayman as far as data fetching goes, this isn't so bad. As long as it's not hitting more than once a second, it's not being any worse of a citizen than it's ever been.
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