Thanks for the feedback on this.
One thing we could do is lower the outbound connections from 15 to 10 or maybe even 5. The choice of 15 was arbitrary. It just needs to be enough for redundancy and fast exponential propagation of messages. 10 would still be plenty. 5 should be fine. 10 is good as a nice round number so users can see that it stopped intentionally.
It would help to implement UPnP so there would be more inbound accepting nodes. Your number of connections is the ratio of inbound accepting nodes to out-only times 15. We need to encourage more people to accept inbound connections.
I will implement a feature to stop accepting inbound connections once you hit a certain number.
Which version are you running?
Anyone know how many connections typical P2P software like BitTorrent can get up to?