One of the reasons that many don't feel excited about eDonkey, besides its boring GUI, is becuase there are too many tricks (most undocumented) to go through before really take advantage of its powerful search and swarm file transfer.

When I first used eDonkey, I've got usually 1-5kb/s download speed, now with aids from the 'Bot' and server list and all the proper configuration, the speed can go up to 100 kb/s. The speed here, 50kb/s to 100kb/s, I meant is very stable, it remains this speed in hours.

When look into the list of sources that feed the download (of course, most are PARTIAL file), there are usually over hundred sources with a few of them transferring and the rest are in 'Queue' status.

Many also hate eDonkey due to the fact that it forces you to share partial file (those still in the middle of downloading), and purposely slow you down sometimes (conspiracy) to force you to stay on line longer and sharing, so a MP3 file may appear taking longer to download than Gnutella, but in case of a DivX, it will take much less time and give you more confidence to have it in a a short amout of time.

At the moment, all I need is eDonkey. Compare to what eDonkey can do, the rest of P2P world are really all jokes, take a look at http://www.sharereactor.com. However, the fear eDonkey may one day disappears is always there as it's a close source program, soon or later it will draw attention while it's becoming more and more a dominent deliver channel of the 'stuff' (luckily, not many tech media are paying attention to eDonkey's low profile status) That's why Gnutella needs to catch up and get the lead back while there is still chance.