I blocked ads through the same process around a year ago. However, after they started bundling opt-out adware in the installer and did this
https://torrentfreak.com/utorrent-quietly-installs-riskware-bitcoin-miner-users-report-150306/ , I immediately uninstalled it.
I now use Deluge (
http://deluge-torrent.org/ ). The interface doesn't look as good as uTorrent and it isn't as feature packed. It has a nice plugin system though. After adding a couple of plugins, I now have nearly all the features I used in uTorrent.
There's also qBittorent (
http://www.qbittorrent.org/ ). It looks better than deluge but it doesn't have a plugin system and the scheduler doesn't allow you to completely turn off downloads. You can only set it to limited speeds (minimum of 1 kbps is possible) so I chose Deluge.
Both Deluge and qBittorrent are completely free and I doubt they will ever resort to the tactics that uTorrent now uses.