There's no compulsion to upgrade to WireShare 5.6.3. However, there are notable improvements. There's also no need to use the LimeStart which LPE needs to either overcome Java 7 path issues or the risk of the connection file being erased if not used after 28 days. WireShare has fixed both those issues, as well as a few other bugs & inefficiencies LPE had.

Perhaps it's just my imagination, but I seem to get better search results with WireShare. I've tested certain keyword searches for years to test how good the peers I'm connected to are. Getting over 200-300 search results then a single get-more results for 500-700 on different sessions I considered good compared to some miserable results on LPE or earlier versions of LW. To compare fairly, it seems the average of reasonable search results that appears to have improved. Always exceptions.

I won't drag into possible reasons for this compared to LPE such as less direct connections to the very old type clients that are much less efficient at handling search queries, particularly via UDP (if they are even capable of UDP query handling & responding.) If not, they resort to tcp.