It's great to see that work is going on to improve the download success rate,
but I haven't seen anything about addressing another major problem with Gnutella:
in my (limited) experience, downloading requires "active management", meaning that
I need to keep an eye on what is happening. The result is that using Gnutella
eats up a lot of my time. Of course, the necessity of being at the computer
imposes a kind of discipline that may be desirable to discourage irresponsible
consumption of bandwidth, but for the long term I would like to see a "servent"
that is more of a "servant", that automates the process of obtaining specified
files or material pertaining to a specified subject, so that I can just give it
a "want list" and go away for hours or days while the agent works on its own.
Following LimeWire's design philosphy, such an agent could be designed to support
the network e.g. by searching at times when it finds that the Net is not
overburdened.

I believe this sort of thing is being developed in other realms of the Internet,
and ultimately an agent would search using multiple protocols or intelligently
choose the ones best suited to a given request.