The patch will remain to work, KM just seems to be mad they're just using a hexed version of his old patch. He just wants them to make something to call their own, which they're doing. Hopefully it'll be done some time soon, but I have no clue how far along it is.
The patch effects filesharing and the chat rooms, the patch is what makes winmx connect to the wpn. The network that does it all, without it. Chat room server's can't report their room to the network. So you'd get no list to channels. You'd have to know the channel name to get in, good thing about favorites.
You also wouldn't be able to connect to share or get any kind of files, so it'd become a useless program if you didn't have the network to connect to.
I believe it'll always be around. It hasn't come this far for nothing, no p2p program has ever done anything like WinMX has. Specially after the RIAA went through all of that to shut it down, lol.