Just an update, but I haven't encountered any new bugs so far in this version (ELM 1.22 r32).
There's several features I'm really loving so far:
Pets don't eat food off the ground, meaning they won't steal corpses if I don't get there in time. You can still give them food, though, and they'll eat it, but they'll refuse to take Cursed or Poisoned stuff.
NPCs may drop bottles of blood, eggs, shit, and occasionally water, when they die. In fact, the first bottle of water I've found on this character is a "bottle of old man water". ...Not sure if want... :|
You now choose your recipe when you cook. This is my favourite improvement by far. I stick to cooking low-skill foods like "fried x" or "x cookies" so there's less chance of failure when grinding, and then when I find quests asking for specific foods, I can focus my attempts on cooking exactly what they need.
There's also supposed to be a menu that pops up after Party Time quests, giving you a chance to grab any tossed loot you missed, but I've never seen it... maybe that's on a more recent beta version or something.
Anyway, highly recommend this version to anyone thinking of picking up the game after a long break. It's certainly done a lot to refresh the gameplay for me.