If you think things are bad in rural America, try being thousands of miles away in Singapore. I never make a "live" connection in more than 5% of tries and of those 5%, most stall at some point during the download. I turned LW into a game, devising strategies for optimising the download percentage once a connection was made and I now get very good results, albeit with concentrated effort required.

Just leaving it to the machine is useless. You have to be proactive. And you are correct. LW does not survive sleep. You have to keep it awake.

Now my experience should tell you that you can download several hundred files a week. But to get improved results, you have to want to experiment and learn from that experience. Do you want that improvement badly enough?