I think this has less to do with increased freeloaders than it does with the fact that most peers no longer "ping" and "pong" each other (to save bandwidth).

This is where the host and file info came from and since peers stopped reporting, it's more or less worthless now. You may actually have access to many, many times the number of files shown. Unfortunately, there's no good way to know anymore.

I've been hoping peers would begin to use some of the other info they have available to them. For example, a node using more bandwidth is likely to have more hosts. Even better, a node with a high ratio of search results to queries - lots of results probably means lots of files being shared while limited results likely means more freeloaders.