Gather Glitch or Just an Annoyance on the New Format?

I'm pissed off at Gather.  And when I say pissed off, I mean royally pissed off.  I come onto Gather for relaxation.  I write.  I chat.  I read.  I rate.  I comment.  I use Gather as a blog of sorts for my life.  I've been a member for a little over 2 years now and even when I first joined, I wasn't so annoyed with them.  Gather had just burst onto the internet networking / blogging scene.  Everything was going well.  Changes were made along the way that I could deal with.  This time, Gather has gone too far.

Every since this new (and more complicated) format has been put in place, I find Gather to be far less user friendly.  On top of that, I have to do everything 3 times before I see any change to my page.  For example, when I published an article back in the day, it came up on the articles page immediately.  Now, it takes a few minutes.  When I read or delete an message in my Gather inbox, the symbol at the top of my screen doesn't go away.  It still says I have the same amount of messages I had before I deleted or read them.  Same goes for when I get invited to groups or have new friend invitation.  The symbols don't go away.  And 99% of the time, when I click back into my inbox, friends or group pages to check to make sure everything got deleted, the stuff I deleted is still showing as NEW!  It's time consuming and annoying.  This morning, I attempted to remove myself from about 20 groups that I have never published to, or haven't published to in a very very long time.  I like the "post it all" type groups and the other groups in my group listing make for a more time consuming publish.  I removed them but they weren't showing as removed!  So as I publish this article, I have no idea if they actually were removed from my groups or not!

How come everything takes FOREVER to do around here these days?  Whenever I come on here to publish, I always have my article typed out ahead of time so if something goes wrong on Gather, I still have my article saved.  I also sometimes type at work and cannot sit on Gather at work.  Typing ahead of time, allows me to simply copy and paste from a word document and quickly publish.  This new format, with slower EVERYTHING is making things a lot more difficult for me and I'm getting frustrated.

When I read my inbox messages, I want them to show up as being read.  When I accept friends, I want that symbol to go away immediately.  When I join a group, I also want to see that symbol disappear.  And when I go back into these areas within Gather, I want to see that the action I took earlier, has been taken i.e. deleted or read.  If I already deleted and/or read the message, why is it still showing as new in my inbox???  If I removed myself from a group, why is it still showing up on my group page?

And even more importantly, how come when I publish an article, it takes sometimes 5-10 minutes to show up on the articles page???  I'm getting far fewer comments on my articles than I used to get. 

On another note, I find it so difficult to find many of the friends I used to communicate with on Gather.  I can't remember when the last time I saw an article by William M was.  And Michelle K!  I miss her and I know she's posting pictures of her new baby but everything is so diffucult to find now, that I can't locate them without searching in the search bar. 

Everything takes too long to do on new Gather.  Either fix the glitch or go back to the old Gather.