Nice description of the problem; especially the fish-fight analogy

Needs More Sources means that the known and reported sources have been tried and haven't responded, so another search is needed.

However, the reasons an online host hasn't responded can really vary, as you saw. Maybe it is busy, the owner cancelled an upload, the host is using a buggy implementation of the code, or in the case of a firewalled host, the intermediary relays have gone offline.

If my understanding of reading the developers remarks is correct, improved searching and getting of rare content is in the works, so I'm hoping there'll be less babysitting of rare downloads.

This is something I hope can be improved on LW. My approach for doing a search for those rare files is if nothing comes up, to delete all my ultrapeers and do the search again and again. At times I've run both Frostwire and Limewire giving me access to 9 ultrapeers at a time. I’m not sure there’s any advantage to that though.

Which brings up a question you might be able to answer. I'm sharing some 1200 files and I'm wondering whether it's a good idea to not make them available when I'm shopping for ultrapeers. I'm not sure they hold in cache an index of all the files from all the leaves... and if I move on, it will mess up the searches of other users... or put stress on the network.

Also... speaking of searches... just how many hops does a ultrapeer pass a request on to? Just what's happening when I request "search for more sources" and it counts down from 300? And just what is Out Of Band searching?

Thanks!