I think it's obvious from the experience of many users (not just me -- really, check the Acquisition forums) that this is probably okay for local networks, and maybe even okay for files that are commonly hosted by, well, a host of clients, but it is extremely bad for that most common of Gnutella situations, i.e., when many clients are after a file hosted by a tiny minority of hosts. Especially when the clients play by different rules.

If you have one client that implements the chunk downloads (handing over its download spot to someone else after only a 97.7k transfer) versus another client that hangs on to the connection like a bulldog until it is complete, who do you think is going to end up with the successful download?