Just a little update as far as how .131 is performing on my VZW 8330:
I wiped my media card and reformatted, and performance increased just slightly. After the 2.6 upgrade, I re-entered all my email addresses and found no changes except the gmail bug of copying sent messages back to the device is now gone. I never saw a huge problem with the GPS being flaky for me, but I have continued to play with it, and although it does occasionally search for a signal, it seems to be more accurate in its updating and my position is more accurate than in prior versions. My battery life was fair with .131, but after reading through dozens of threads hoping to eliminate a duplicate calendar appointment issue, I stumbled across a few people reporting the facebook app causing some lag and excessive battery drains. I ended up removing the FB app, doing a battery pull, and reinstalling and so far (1+ days) have had no lag, and my battery life seems to be improved.
To sum it up, with a media card reformat and a reinstall of the FB app, I have a good functioning device on .131 with no lag and good battery life. The only remaining issues are the lag when waking up when using the trackball (spacebar to wake seems to wake up the handheld much quick <1 sec) and the GPS (which I'm really not having that much of an issue with).
One last thing, I also did turn off Content Compression (Options/Security/General Options/Content Compression) and that has sped up the device significantly.
If this is all known knowledge, well, it's still probably not at the bottom of the barrel for 'useless posts taking up drive space', and if it does help some people, please continue to post up any other observations or tips/tweaks. I still have to upgrade the wife's device and I want to get it running smoothly the first time around.