Well, I can't say I agree with you (as obvious by my review of BearShare). I hate to sound like a LimeWire evangelist/BearShare critic, so I'll try to comment without choosing sides :)

From a non-tech savvy perspective, the one I would choose comes down to how easy it is to use and if it works right. That was LimeWire or iMesh, I ran into to many troubles and missing features with BearShare to warrant my endorsement over another product. I never have a problem getting connected to multiple nodes using LimeWire, either at work or at home, and I get far less failures using it over BearShare.

As far as LimeWire being slow... well, it's java, so it will naturally run slower, but, as I pointed out in the article, being connected to the network using BearShare has caused my computer to grind to a crawl and even give me the "blue screen of death". I don't run into that problem very often using LimeWire.

I believe that your sentence "I have never had a 200+ kbps download on limewire, while i routinely get 1.5mbps downloads on bearshare" might be true for some, but I've gotten many downloads over 1mbps using LimeWire.

To tell you the truth, if I were really into file-trading, I'd stick with nap servers, where many of these issues are avoided :)