Hey Vinnie -- good to see you over hear on the LimeWire forums!

The proprietary implementation problem is definitely an issue. Hopefully the openness of the query routing proposal (the QRP that Vinnie alluded to, the underlying technology behind the old "Sparky" alpha), and of the supernode scheme and the LimeWire source code will help mitigate this problem.

As far as discovery of servers, that is one of the trickiest problems that we have faced as well, although I think that Anurag and Chris have worked out most of the issues there.

Best,