Wow, this thread has gotten out of hand!
I never would have imagined that this feature would raise so much controversy, although this isn't the only place it's discussed; it's come up in #gnutella IRC more than once in the past. I simply think of it as a feature, and nothing more -- I don't understand all the talk about it
I think people are too dependant upon this big gnutellaNet (what we know as the gnutellaNet, that is). Let me take you back a few months ago, when I first got my hands on Gnutella 0.45. When I first discovered what it could do, I thought, "Wow! I could setup private networks amongst a group of people and it would be totally anonymous." Not to bore you or anything, but I still keep that view in mind today. It's just my opinion that people get on Gnutella and think of it as this global file-swapping solution like Napster is/was. I really have no news to report about changes with this feature in the upcoming 0.7 release (we just fixed the BBS bug (don't ask), which means we're very close to release!) Anyway, that's just my $0.02.

-Yytrium-