Your points are very well taken. The pro/free issue really comes down to what motivates people to buy pro. I agree with you that many, many people buy pro to support the idealism of the project, and I'd love it if everyone bought it for these reasons. The piracy issue is definitely a concern, and it's somewhat likely that more people will pirate pro as a result of these changes. If that starts to happen on a large enough scale, you're correct that it would hurt the network, in which case we could always go back.

So, I guess I'd say just think of this as an experiment. I very much sympathize with your views, but we need to experiment with various ideas to boost pro sales.

On the idea to have Ultrapeers hold more leaves, I agree that recent improvements have significantly reduced overall resources needed to find files. I guess I don't agree that the way to take advantage of those new resources is to increase the number of leaves/ultrapeer, simply because we'd be unnecessarily increasing the worst-case load (Ultrapeers). We really need Ultrapeers to run successfully on DSL connections with limited upstream capacity (as low as 10 KB/s), which we're now able to do. We could potentially use a couple more KB/s upstream by adding more leaf connections, but we don't have a whole lot of wiggle room between our current upstream use and the DSL limit while still making the system usable. You're right that we could make searches faster, though, so it's definitely something to consider.