www.makemkv.com

So I was using 1.15.4 the last time and I was able to correctly rip 7 individual episodes from my disc.

Using 1.17.2, no matter what option I use in DVD Structure Protection Removal Method / Minimum title length, it will only generate 1 massive file, from the same disc, which I then split using mkvtoolnix.

Is there no way to get the old behavior on the newest version? Is there a downside to using an old version?

This isn't abnormal depending on how the disc was mastered. Some of my discs broke out each episode to a file. Others one big file. When I was recompressing my discs, via Handbrake, I had to use the chapter select to output each episode as their own file during recompression. For example:

episode 1 = chapter 1-6
episode 2 = chapter 7-12
etc.

Depending on the show, the number of chapters per episode differed.

DVDs are getting less attention nowadays, since "everyone has Bluray". It is not unusual to have things as "one file", even though the DVD structure has multiple 1-Gig files. It may be that they're trying to minimize the number of files, but... I cannot tell. But just putting in a menu entry for an episode takes less overhead than a complete episode structure.

I will say that more DVDs that do not come as BDs as well have "one file" for multiple episodes. And yes, using handbrake to split them up is necessary. One of the sellers out there is specializing in "DVD on BD" disks, where there is "one file" that contains all episodes of a DVD series, and just software to take them apart. The worst (so far) had 56 episodes as "one file" on the BD. Splitting with handbrake was necessary after ripping.