Found the same, and agree on splitting up the requests.

Having this complete faster than a single peer's rate-limit is a pretty good reason to support multiple peers and do the load-balancing across peers, then across time if still necessary.  I was thinking of doing this anyway, to cut down on an initial time required for block-chain fast-forwarding.

Question is, do apps implement the multi-peer management or would bitcoinj consider including this at some point?