The idea of Ultrapeering seems to be a good one. Unfortunately they implemented it badly.
I think they could fix it rather easily however. Currently if someone is an ultrapeer it seems like there is no requirement for the ultrapeers outgoing connections. It should not allow any clients/leafs to connect until it has a minimum number of stable outgoing connections. This is what would really determine how many results you get back from a search. If you connect to a ultrapeer that has one connected outgoing connection and 1 other leaf on it, you'll probably get almost nothing back from your searches. If, however, you connect to an ultrapeer with 15 stable outgoing connections to other ultrapeers you'll probably get better results than you would have ever gotten before. I believe at this point a majority of the ultrapeers are not connected well enough to be used. This is just theory though since the statistics you see are now meaningless and reflect only older clients. If the statistics were working and valid this could be verified.
In the mean time they should allow us to connect to multiple ultrapeers as clients. Or do what Xolox did and periodically re-search your searches adding new results to your list. This way if you connect to a badly connected ultrapeer your results will get better as it's connections get better.