your right about freenets general crappiness but what i was refering to is that it was roughly based on freenets "topology", in that how the nodes/peers are orginised in the grid. 1 or 2 other things may be slightly simaler but freenet was never suposed to be a filesharing network anyway. i dont wont to get in to a limewire vs nodezilla battle, because when it comes to speed and avalability of files the gnutella based p2p win hands down, hence why i love limewire.
i wouldnt say nodezilla has made some miraculus breakthrough but it has made a lot of major improvments to the way a grid p2p works. for instance the ability for data to be cashed as it is routed through the grid is certainly inovative. this is also combined with forward error control, which means that as files can still be downloaded even if the original sharer it gone, which is in effect persistant distributed storage. also since the files are cashed closer to you it means the the load on any individual node is reduced and download speeds are increassed, if someone later downloades the file. this effect incresses with the popularity or the file.
in relation sharing and searching the most reasent release has delt with this compeatly and the search result are quite good. the download speeds are reletivly good, 30 to 50KB/s on my 2Mb/s line.

Ultimately my point is, if all your looking for is speed then stick with limewire because when it comes to speed limewires the king among p2p. But if your looking for anonymity and security then there are very promising alternetives.