I agree, fasttrack has some pretty good advantages, but over time, the competition between bearshare, limewire, gnucleus and others is slowly making gnutella more powerful.

Limewire superpeers will open up the visible horizon on gnutella by a factor of 20 or more.

BearShare ping/pong scheme reduces traffic over 70%, opening up the network to better query and query result flow.

As clients implement these new features and others like hashing, etc.. gnutella is not a static protocol, every day improvements are being made, new proposals debated, and code written to bring it all together.