What do you suggest to make the "now what?" less of a problem? That is, how could the GUI be more intuitive to say "search, choose a result and click download"?

Other problems, like "what are the numbers before & after the '/' in the Uploads column of a library" are just simply not something that can be concisely explained in a simple GUI. LimeWire is a very complex program, and has all sorts of statistics that can be displayed -- those that are useful for everyday usage I personally think are very intuitive already (but I'm of course biased).

Fancy features like fragmented progress bar (displaying chunks) are nice for people who know that they're downloading/uploading files in fragments -- but the vast majority of people don't know and don't care about that, they just want to know how far along they are in completing their download.

The ultimate goal, of course, is to have a happy medium of an interface between power-users and casual-users... but too often the happy medium in between turns out to be the worst of both worlds.

Regarding seperate profiles for ultrapeers/leaves... with compression turned on, the upstream bandwidth difference between an Ultrapeer and a leaf is around 3-6KB/s, but no more than 6KB/s. It's basically like having one permanent extra upload going. One of LimeWire's goals is to reduce the requirements of all ultrapeers by having more of them (and having optimizations with regards to message exchange). This lets takes more participation, but the burden on any single machine is much much lower.