I've yet to find a VIP that gets you special treatment, you'll usually just find it gets your questions answered reasonably

as far as cost vs seedbox, you can buy freeleech on IPT for ~$30 month and go balls out. There may be better free leech/VIP offers, I'm only on a handfull of privs and that's about the best I've seen. Other than that you can get a 2TB seedbox and run 30TB of bandwidth credit a month pretty easily anywhere that has Freeleech torrents for ~$25 a month.