There is no battery drain in either the older or the newer versions - it has been written with energy consumption in mind, and has been tested and measured.

If you think there is, please measure it and report the findings, and make sure that you measure the usage of the "billboardd" daemon, not any other applications that you might have running on your device (or coincidentally installed around the time of the upgrade).

Of course, any application that runs on your device will use some power, but in the case of Billboard, it's mostly just sitting idle and taking up some RAM / swapspace.

See this post.