My take was that what Matt is doing is very cool and when blocks are several MB in size something like this or Gavin's alternative proposal for eliminating retransmission of transactions with every block will be important.

For me, each of my nodes has a connection which p2pool and bitcoind never come close to utilising. So I didn't think the block size was a particularly big deal at the moment from a speed perspective. Don't know if that's been actively researched.

If Matt's built it and it works then I see no reason not to connect to one of his nodes to gain the benefit of it.