Although this exceeds the recommended in the FAQ and what I can find online, this seems to offer a good range of potential clients to get into queues. As soon as I lose one, I gain another, no waiting around for connections.
I do realise I'm thrashing my connection a bit, but it's all in a good cause, and I'm not using the entire upstream anyway.
In fact when I changed back this configuration from orginal, I had no trouble maxing out my download channel!

What configurations have other edonkey users found useful?