I was having issues with camera-ui (original AND new), which nothing seemed to fix. On a whim, I decided to try the new 720p package because it contained some up-stream fixes. I figured it was already broken, so what could it hurt? Since then, camera-ui hasn't gotten the dreaded gst-faults (where when run from xterm it complains about not being able to allocate resources on dsp to save the image).

I see no reason to stay on the older drivers if they're not working for you... Give the new ones a shot. (Btw: I did discover that disabling SR vdd1 was needed to make it work properly for recording. Playback seemed to work fine in both modes though... How odd is that?)