Wow. that's an impressive file. I just use adblock plus, myself, but to each his own.
Same here, adblockplus, each of there own catches one that the other misses.
One that got me using 127.0.0.1 facebook.com is that I had a windows gadget installed, and facebook kept connecting to me, I could not figure it out. One day, sniffing around in the gadget, I seen facebook connect, said this is a stop right now, collected all the facebook hosts blocking and added it, i think twitter was connecting as well. On top of it, it does indeed help load pages much faster, by blocking all the try to connects. The bottom half is from mvps, blocking ads that adblockplus misses and adp blocks what hosts file misses. Work and work.