What you guys are talking about is totally in conflict with the Gnutella protocol. Also, I saw a suggested feature before about "intelligently" selecting hosts. I've been hearing this since day one, even before I was involved with Gnotella. Fortunately, a solution is imminent. In the next release of Gnotella, v0.7, Gnotella will grab hosts off the host catcher starting from the top (when "Sort" is enabled), so, you can just check the "Sort" checkbox and click on the Hops column to sort by the hops count. Could it be any simpler?

-Yytrium-