After switching to Linux, I was looking for a good client. I did some searches and came across xMule first.
After a long and painful learning process (getting the right prereq packages to work with my distro), I got xMule compiled and working fine... except for occassional crashes if I left the program running for more than a couple of hours.
Then, while checking for an updated version one day, I started reading back through the announcements. Reading the rants there, I began to suspect that the xMule dev was a complete jerk.
It was actually in his flames, that I saw first mention of aMule! I thought "This guy's not very mature, so why not give this thing he hates a try..."
I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only was aMule better than xMule in just about every way, but it was not a total pain in the ass to compile as xMule had been (though that could partially be due to the fact that I would have installed all pre-reqs while playing with xMule).
aMule was much more stable for me, so I never looked back.