I love the way you word your posts. I don't know why you should be so self-conscious b/c we're all basically anonymous anyway. I can only answer one part of your questions (murasame would be best at the other questions.) Many people like myself only have a dialup connection & I only achieve around 5-6 KB/s dwnld. If I'm dwnlding more than one file or the connection to the other party is not very good, it might be less. Also, people with better connections will often spread their dwnlds b/w several files so the speed they may get for one file 'might' be small. I've noticed that if I change my upld speed it seems to upset the uplders & they drop off after a few secs. - even when I've put it to unlimited. I don't know why this is. Do you use a firewall? Have you made sure you've maximised your upld/dwnld speeds according to your connection. There's threads discussing this here & the Upld/Dwnld section (Maximizing upload/download Success LimeWire).
My thoughts were that the threads you were refering to tended to forget about people like me.
So where are your arms now?