Yeah the change in the "swipe down" detection is annoying (both N950 and N9 on PR1.1).
It used to be that you swiped from the natural top of the app (portrait or landscape) and it would close. On a couple of apps (sdl ones perhaps?) it couldn't tell that the app was landscape so it didn't quite work.
In PR1.1 they changed it to always gravity-up being the top of the screen, regardless of the orientation of the app running. Which is all fine and good until you use the phone lying down in bed etc at which point everything is counter-intuitive and wrong. e.g. Lying on your right side using a portrait app, swipe-from left will close it.
This is obviously a conscious decision to change, so I'm hoping someone left in a gconf variable or something to switch to the old behaviour.