My initial thoughts:
* I like the scrollbars. Kinetic scrolling is a great idea, but scrollbars are faster for long lists & kinetic scrolling had some odd behavior. And hooray for multiple-selection! This helps me b/c I usually listen to podcasts in bunches. It also helps for loading Librovox.org books as a podcast & downloading the chapters via gPodder.
* I agree that it seems snappier!
* Really niggling, but for Episode Details merely pressing the escape button closes the pop-up. But for Subscriptions/Podcast Settings a long hold of escape closes the pop-up. I prefer the "merely pressing" for all such pop-ups, but any kind of consistency would give me one last idiosyncratic factoid to have to store in my brain.
* I've had to shift some usage patterns due to removed features, but I think it's OK.
Thanks for your work on this!