Did Bittorrent become popular without MSM coverage?
I'm not really sure.
Yes, it did. The Bittorrent whitepaper was a breakthrough in p2p not matched until Satoshi came along.
All the cruft of Gnutella (anti-leech arms race kludges, supernodes, etc) was swept away by Bram's brilliantly elegant tit-for-tat algorithm.
Well someone did come along before Satoshi in 2008 and that was me (Shelby), but I was apparently ignored. I basically predicted the Net Neutrality shit we have now and was trying to improve Bram's concept:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130401040049/http://forum.bittorrent.org/viewtopic.php?pid=178#p178Did Bittorrent implement my proposal? I never followed up (my life went on a tangent).
You can detect some more coherence in my writing back then because that was before I became so ill. I am amazed in hindsight that I understood the concepts of Bittorrent so well having absolutely no experience whatsoever as a developer in P2P.