Lets say I run a node, I don't care much about my own privacy... Thus I peer fairly promiscuously, connecting with people who I hardly know as long as they don't look too much like an EvilForce(tm).
I do, however, have some friends who care more about anonymity than me. They trust me not to operate a subverted node.. and perhaps they have a few other friends like me... well connected because we're peer sluts but personally trustable. My friends might have some more friends who care even more about anonymity. They want to be an extra hop away from the wildly connected portion of the graph. As it stands right now, my friends (and their friends) can't use freenet.... They can't use it because they can't stay connected. As my client uses it's capacity for it's zillion and one promiscuous peerings, the chances that at any given time my friends will be backed off is really good. Since my friend has a higher standard for who he'll peer with, he doesn't have many peers. Thus the chances that he'll spend most of his time partitioned from the network are pretty good. This could be drastically improved if I could set a preference on peers which I wish to reserve capacity to keep my connections up with... such information would be kept private to me but it would enable my less connected friend nodes to stay strongly connected, while I'm able to have widespread connectivity which makes my node valuable to him.
