I just upgraded at home to suse11.1-rc and am using kde4. The initial setup makes kget the default tool for downloading torrents, and whilst it works I find ktorrent to be more richly featured.

Is the intention to merge ktorrent into kget, as the existence of two similar tools only confuses!

kget is made default do download anything. ktorrent is to download bt torrent only, I don't think they are similiar tools.

I'm now on kde4.2, and I now feel strongly that either kget and ktorrent should merge OR kget should have its torrent feature removed in order to keep things simple!

I have to agree with speculatrix. No need for two download programs, one that can do everything the other can (or at least should be able to). It isn't like kget is particularly complicated to use.

The difference is that KTorrent is a fully featured bittorrent client which is shipped as part of Network Extragear, while KGet is a download manager, which is shipped as part of KDE Network. ( Official KDE )

That doesn't explain why kget can't by a fully featured one-stop download manager. Why not integrate anything from ktorrent that kget is missing and use kget for everything?

Because integrating all the torrent client features into KGet would require a much more advanced interface, which would become too complex for the original task of simply downloading files over HTTP / FTP.