As a protocol is worse in everyway that BitTorrent.
No it is not. Please don't talk about shit you don't know. If anything it was too ahead of the time since the internet speeds available at the time were crap (for example compare the emule's 9MiB block with the original 512KiB from bittorrent), and also it was the first one to bring almost all the concepts that bittorrent uses.
People complain about the lowid, but at the same time they want to run it without opening ports to external connections like they do for bittorrent. Fortunately there's already a emule mod (emuleai) that allows lowid to lowid. Hopefully amule will follow it soon.