Torrents are great. Personally I use both torrents and the gnutella network. In fact, I have one program for private torrents and another for public torrents. I like to keep their bandwidth separate. I tend to mostly use LimeWire and Phex for the gnutella network. Phex because it has had a habit of finding the rarer files.

Gnucleus is an old client that has not been updated in about 7 or 8 years. But there other gnutella network clients that are more up-to-date.