I'm gonna go out on a limb and contribute my 2 cents to this. I'm currently attempting to develop a servent of my own. In my case, I'm not only trying to develop a servent, I'm trying to develop a "successful" servent.... one that includes a lot of the features that people are looking for.

I'm just going to go through your points one by one, bobbinson, and add my comments:

1) Ultrapeers - So far, they look promising.... and I would agree they are a healthy addition to the Gnutella network. I have my reservations about how they are currently being implemented, but that's another story.

2) From my understanding of what "swarming" is, I don't believe any current servent supports it, but I will admit that I'm not up to speed on it so I may be wrong. If you mean multisegmented downloading, I think no servent should be without it.

3) Yes, yes, yes! There have been times when I preferred searching on the Fast Track network because I was able to search for keywords in the meta data. I agree that it would be a very important addition to the Gnutella network.

4) Um... NO! I think searching peoples' hard disks for media files "by default" would do more harm than good. I have no doubt that this would dump more data on the network. However, how much of it would be "useful" is another question. There are already enough people out there with shared folders containing their incomplete downloads. If servents were made to automatically search users' drives for sharable media, then how many copies of "The Microsoft Sound.wav" do you think would start showing up on the network because those users allowed their servent to share their WINDOWS\MEDIA folder? Even if you ask people if it's OK to share those things, remember, most people accept the defaults. And taking into account the computer literacy of the average user, I know of a few "minimally computer literate" users already that couldn't change their sharing settings even if the settings were wrong.

And not to mention the privacy issues this would cause. I know of people who have digital cameras that would find it quite alarming to find their family photos had automatically been shared because their Gnutella servent decided it wanted to find sharable media. Again, these are users that probably wouldn't know how to change their sharing settings even if they wanted to.

5. Personally, I don't see why allowing different bandwidths for different file types would be useful. Quite frankly, I would rather a person downloading a 5MB MP3 from me be done downloading in 2 minutes than 4 minutes because bandwidth usage for MP3s is half that of digital video files. That's 2 minutes less waiting for someone else wanting one of my upload slots. IMO, if someone's downloading a video file from me, they're going to be downloading for quite a while regardless of how much bandwidth I can provide them.

6. I know the freeloading debate has been heated, but here's my 2 cents on the issue. I don't agree with blocking freeloaders... period. As has been stated numerous times before, they're part of the network once they join. They may be the only route between you and someone else with a file you want. However, I will also concede that they don't contribute to search results at all.

I'm sure this has already been mentioned already (although I couldn't find any mention of it in the threads I read) but what about just not counting freeloaders as hops when routing query packets? If a servent isn't sharing files and it receives a query packet, then it should just pass it on WITHOUT decrmenting the TTL field or incrementing the Hops field within the query packet as they normally would. Likewise, on the return trip, query hit packets would also not have their TTL or Hops fields modified. I know I probably haven't put as much thought into this idea as necessary, so anyone feel free to shoot holes in it. It's just something I thought of on the spur of the moment.

7. I think this is really a matter of personal preference. I prefer seperate locations for my incomplete files. I personally don't like wading through a list of partials mixed with complete files just to find one specific file. And no, it probably wouldn't even help to hide incomplete files. I'm one of those guys who likes to see everything including hidden files. I applaud all servents that give me the option to save my incomplete files somewhere other than my downloads folder.