What's with all this junk? BearShare and LimeWire are both terrible file sharing programs, neither of them are reliable for downloading (which I hear is due to the gnutella protocol, not the client), and they do not support chat, list browsing, or hot-lists (even for static IPs). All of these things are necessary to bring back the functionality of Napster.
I do know the features I've mentioned are possible, because I've heard authors of gnutella clients speak of implementing them. Though I don't see it, what's the hold up?

money

...has nothing to do with it

...no? Then show me a good open source client.

In all honesty I like the current P2P programs better than Napster... we are beginnning to demand more and we don't realize how far they have come... I will admit that I do kinda miss the chat, but at the same time I don't... you would always get stupid people ranting about stupid things... it was annoying (yes I am aware that you could block it, but it was still annoying)... besides I have more luck finding the music I listen to on gnutella than I ever did on napster... (gnutella seems to hold more rarities than napster)... gnutella and fasttrack have come a long way...

Whether it's open source or not has nothing to do with it, the protocol is open source, at least I'm assuming, I'm not the most familiar person on the planet with gnutella.

milhouse_ph,
For me it's the exact opposite, I listen to the most obscure genres of music there are, and I can't find ANY of it on said clients. Granted, chat isn't the most important thing, but I think list browsing was, it was the number one way I discovered new music. By finding who has a certain band, then browsing their list for similar music I may not know of... I won't even use a client that doesn't have that capability.
WinMX (not gnutella), has these abilities, and is decentralized... however it doesn't have no where near enough users, so again, I can't find any music of interest.
IMO, there isn't a client out there that is nearly as good as Napster was. Also, I used Napster in conjunction with audioGnome, so I had much more functionality than the Napster client on the network.

oh by no stretch of the imagination am I thrilled and with the current network... but I am happy with it... I think that in time we will get to that point... I've been using gnutella since last year and I only recently became interested in how it operated... I personally feel that it has come a long way... I'm sorry to hear that you have trouble with the clients... have you tried all of them... I find that gnucleus and Xolox work really well... also what kind of music are you looking for???

Only in a dreamworld programmers do not have to pay for food, rent, car, caffeine, hobbies, dogfood - and have endless free time for coding open source - live only for fame and beauty of code - to reincarnate in frag heaven. Gimme $50000 and we start on your deluxe client, dude. Questions?

Interesting.
"pay for food, rent, car, caffeine, hobbies, dogfood"

People usually refer to those as living expenses, which you pay whether you program or not.
They are not expenses of programming. I code in my spare time, it doesn't cost me a dime.
So what exactly is the $50,000 for? Are you looking to buy 10 more computers for.... beta testing?

milhouse_ph,
I haven't tried all of the lesser known clients... due to my bad experiences with gnutella clients thus far. Also I look for the clients with the most users, as that's the only way I'll find the music I look for. Have any to recommend?

clients that I prefer:

Gnucleus... (this one allows you to really see what is going on behind the scenes which is important if you want to tweak your horizon)

Xolox... this has multiple host downloading...

of all the thing you requested:

"support chat, list browsing, or hot-lists (even for static IPs)"

I don't know of any client that have these.... so you'll still have to resort to other ways of finding new music... if you want to look at other P2P networks go here:

http://www.zeropaid.com/

it's got a nice list... you might find something with what you want... have you tried Kazaa (aka Fasttrack)... it's a pretty good network too...