I agree.  Edonkey is ugly and cumbersome, and sometimes it's hard to log into a server.  (We're not even talking about Overnet here; I've never gotten that to work properly.)  Upload and download speeds do not really make any sense, and there's no provision for manually adjusting this.  Often I had people downloading from me at maybe 5K/sec, when I have approx 1Mbps of upstream bandwidth.  Documentation for edonkey is frustratingly incomplete, and is no help.  There's an active user community, but help and resources are haphazard.
The good thing I've noticed about edonkey is that once you're connected and start downloading a file, you'll usually get that file eventually.