Well, I tried it, and I think it is definitely an improvement. It actually ran for over 6 hours before it 'unexpectedly quit' on me. No, I'm not being cynical this time. For reals.
If we can now just avoid regression until we get to the 3 version, there is hope once again.

It still has some 'connection' issues. I don't want to mislead anyone. I tried to download a popular mp3 file with 10 hosts, and it never did connect, but it was retrying for 287 ..... whatever that means. And then there were some corruption warnings on other files, so we're not quite out of the woods, but again, it is improved from 2.8.5, in my estimation.