1) There are some patches for the progress bars to show which chunks of the file have been downloaded, - but since LimeWire should download in the correct order beginning at byte 0 ending at the last byte, (at least recent versions do so), seeing which chunks have been downloaded should not be interesting at all.

2) The dropped IO column is hidden by default, like the rest of the connections tab so it won't lead to any misunderstandings for most of the users.

3) Java Swing does not offer you much flexibility as far as the look-and-feel is concerned. It's probably not worth the effort to try and add some real skins like Shareaza has them.

All of those GUI issues should have VERY low priority compared to new features like push-proxy, DHT or Partial-Filesharing. I wouldn't mind if LimeWire had only a command-line interface if it had all those others features instead.

Why should you have an outgoing connection if you are an ultrapeer? You might have one when you connect for the first time but the longer you stay connected, the more likely you are to have only incoming connections.

The number of dropped IO messages are lower because of pong caching. LimeWire does not sent as many pongs as it used to, so naturally less of them are dropped by flow control.