It was a bug, not a feature.
However, there is only a de facto standard, as multi-tracker announcements are rarely implemented as written:
http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0012.html
https://github.com/bittorrent/bittorrent.org/issues/82
However, the division between first order groups and second order groups is still respected.
You can mass-edit the tracker data to put each link into its own group, then the client should update all trackers equally. I'm more interested in learning which kind of activity might actually use that setup, though.