You must differ here. Mike disabled ultrapeer mode himself, so that Shareaza doesn't become a Gnutella UP by default. So he clearly thinks that at least UP mode is outdated. And that's what I mainly was referring to. Operation in leaf mode isn't bad, but to be honest other people probably are better in judging this than me. If you have concrete comments about Gnutella's leaf mode support, then you're more than welcome to post them. (Or about UP support, but this one is known to be outdated.)

Sorry for not being able to point you to a thread concerning Gnutella. The truth is that not all development is going on on the forum, or even in this section of the forum. We also have a development channel on IRC and a help channel, where other discussions happen, which often may be for development, too. I heard about developers investigating into Shareaza's Gnutella support. I didn't mean to promise anything, nor to say that it's going to be fixed in 2.2. But I sure hope so.

The speed of a single upload is the wrong thing for judging. It's the total upload to a network that must be considered, which is not possible when only having Shareaza as source for one file. Maybe one client is giving 10 x 2KB, which is not necessarily a bad thing. With strong PFS, this is even good for distributing a file. Different clients have different default queue settings.

Ares' success is due to other things. Shareaza choosed to rather keep its hands clean.

Actually, I wouldn't bother at all if Shareaza would get away from Gnutella. But it's not very thinkable to remove a network from an application, especially because Shareaza originally was a Gnutella-only client. Or it could be disabled by default, or the max number of networks could be restricted. Whatever, this is subject to opinions, which may differ vastly.