I am an active participant in that thread, I have read it from beginning to end, and have yet to hear a compelling reason for mandatory browsing.

Please do tell me why disabling browse is bad for the Gnutella network, since LimeWire didn't have it until 2.4.5, any other gnutella client that has it allows users to disable it, and every other filesharing program (emule, soulseek, hell, even kazaa) allows users to disable it?

As far as I can tell, the only benefit from forcing users to allow browse is so LimeWire can scream, "LOOK! BROWSE WORKS ON EVERYONE, WHETHER THEY LIKE IT OR NOT!" on their website.