I can concur on your findings: It takes amuled a bit more time than eMule to retrieve the sources. But always it is just a matter of time before they are roughly equal. My guess is that eMule and amuled simply use slightly different algorithms to seize, allocate and display the sources.
As for the Kad firewalled, this is because Kad issues a udp ping every hour, sometimes it does not receive the answer back within the allocated time and it shows a "firewallled" message. Normally it will receive the answer within the same second, and then it shows "Kad OK". You will notice this sequence a lot in the logfile, always on the same minute of the hour, the same minute you started the daemon. There is something written about this by Kry somewhere else on the forum.