Hey Guest, I think that's not reflecting gnutella reality IMHO.

About traffic: Ping and pongs are not causing a high gnutella backbone traffic, AFAIK it's the queries and hits that cause it (see gnutella protocoll and traffic statistics). A super peer concept together with a search-cache (described in my text, linked above) could reduce this traffic (queries/hits and also ping/pongs).

About swarming: It's important to make use of modem user. Why? Right now their bandwith is nearly completely wasted and they are often "forced" to be freeloader. Both is very unhealthy for the gnutella network, gnutella means sharing, yeah. When you see how many modem users are on gnutella, the high amout of wasted bandwith is... wow!
As a second point, swarming will spread often requested files over the network. Why is this interesting? We know that right now a small amout of servants serve a lot of files and high amount of servants serve less or no files. This means that some high freqent queried servants have to stand a high load and show buys most time. Swarming could balance this out.

So..... If more people would share, there would be much more files and higher bandwith available for all. While high bandwith users can share the traditional way, swarming is a key to make low bandwith users share with the network. For both, for high and low bandwith users, sharing should mean there is a guaranteed high percentage of bandwith available for their own use! Swarming WILL NOT reduce significant the download ratio for modem users, actually it will highly INCREASE the availability of files and the speed to download for modem users and all other.

Conclusion: There are many ideas to envolve Gnutella and all work together...
1. A superpeer concept for dynamic traffic routing = reducing backbone traffic + improves network toplogy + increases horizon (more available files)
2. Search-caches for reducing double/multiple routed traffic = reducing high amout of search backbone traffic
3. Swarming technology = make use of the high amout of wasted bandwith + will spread often requested files + balance load + less "busy" servants (more available files)

Hope I could explain better.
Greets, Moak