eMule and the eDonkey Network - Getting better or worse?

Hi all,

Thought I would start my forum career here at fileshareingtalk with a discussion topic.

So do you think eD2k et al. is getting better or worse with age?

I've personally moved on for most of my downloads, but there was a time a few years ago where this thing rocked the world (remember ShareReactor and the-realworld.de - that one was excellent for TV caps). The simple idea of it was a dream come true at the time, those ed2k:// links opened up a whole world of being able to create index sites (some good, some bad, some simply excellent).

The other thing that set eDonkey apart was an Open Sauce client - free from gastly adware and actually exceptionally well engineered. Again I remember using with awe the web client from work - it was like Google programmers were spending their "1 free day per week" working on eMule ;)

Of course this was in the days when bittorrent was very new and the whole concept of chunking files and sharing them in a swarm was owned by ed2k.

So my question is, what is ed2k for now? is it still relevent? can it evolve or will it slowly dissapear forever?

Hi everybody btw, been lurking all day after finding this lush forum ;)

niks