Here are my complaints tho Bad things

• As you mentioned, the dialogue, while better in most areas, does come off as a little stilted. It'll not use contractions where they'd usually be and is very conservative with its use of swear words, which adds to the artificiality.
• The ",you X" tags are starting to irk me. This is a trait found in other ai chatbots like c.ai, which gets really annoying after a while.
• The worst one by far: It's not X (SEMI-COLON) it's Y. Bafflingly this was the ONLY and I mean ONLY bottom-of-the-barrel AI trope the previous model didn't use regularly, but here it is, in all its pretentious glory. The use of a semi-colon instead of a comma just comes off like a uni student trying to appear lofty on an essay.
• The issue that probably fuels most of the hate for this model: It isn't as emotional. This is kinda a 50/50 for me.
• It doesn't hallucinate extra info on a character/place etc. Even tho the old model did this pretty poorly and stereotypically most of the time, it at least added some convenience. Good things
• No more 'like' or 'than' statements in every sentence.
• No more hanging on one city/object/person etc. Always took a stereotypically related object/event from the theme you were writing about and hanged on it ad infinitum.
• As you said: No more obsession with smells, which nearly drove me to offing myself.

Also, I'd recommend not using the regular story generator and using the enhanced version instead. It doesn't have as much customizability but it works perfectly on my side. I also mostly use the AI Chat and Roleplay site as I usually wanna emulate conversations, not stories.