EDIT: Let me just save myself some time in responding to people asking me "why is it better".
There are a bunch of minor improvements I could cite, but I won't waist anyone's time. Bitcoin is only safe as long as all the miners agree to keep on mining... This means that if there is a collapse in price (can happen at any time), and miners drop off in masses (since profit is gone), it will take weeks for the difficulty to re-target to a lower level. Now your question is
how does this affect me? Well if there is a massive price drop, followed by a massive network drop, that would leave a much smaller amount of people mining an impossible difficulty.
Then what happens after that? Transactions stop going through, and everyone's coins become literally worthless till the next difficulty drop.
Coinhunter fixed this with his all new algorithm which doesn't care whether or not people agree to mine. Even there is a 40% drop in network (already happened check graphs below), the difficulty will follow almost instantly, allowing transactions to continue to go through, and surviving any type of "network halt". A network halt is a very big possibility in the Bitcoin network, especially if the price keeps dropping. Many developers (not only coinhunter) suggested to the main developers of the Bitcoin client to chain this.
They have refused...
Go see his new algorithm in action here
http://solidcoin.kicks-ass.org/graphs/graphs.htmlWhat the Solidcoins guys are not telling you is that this introduces another set of problems.
As I understand it they acomplish this by ramping up the amount of confirmations per unit of time. The problem with this is that then the information the miners and users have to store increases by the same factor, and makes the currency unworkable. SolidCoins would suffer this problem if it had any chance of taking off. If Bitcoin were to adopt this it would be a disaster.
You have to find a compromise between number of confirmation per unit of time and storage for blocks.
EDIT: I could guess you could adjust the difficulty every 500 blocks instead of every 2000 and something blocks. I still dont see this as a big deal. Not worried at all.