I tried reentering with a heat shield but screw that my ship flips over and starts facing the wrong way, destroying all of the science that I got (but leaving Valentina intact)
This is a problem with the heat shields right now. For some reason they are marked as physicsless so their mass is ignored, but thanks to the new aerodynamics they still affect the airflow. This makes the pod want to flip on an angle, and it gets even worse if you have parts between the pod and the shield.
To "fix" the problem you can edit the part config. The heat shields all have this line: "PhysicsSignificance = 1", which makes the part physicsless. Comment it out or delete it and the heat shields will have weight. I haven't tested extensively but with actual mass the heat shields seem to behave much more realistically. It still isn't as stable as just a pod on its own but you won't have to fight to keep your craft from flipping over and burning up.
THANK YOU. This is the second most annoying thing I have found in this version. Top is that Kerbals still don't know what welding is and thus all my fuel tanks are not the solid block of metal they should be, but are instead a loosely strung together wobbly piece of bullshit.
Ok, that WOULD HAVE been helpful if I knew how the shit to open stupid config files. Because no one in the fucking universe ever thinks "Hey, maybe we should actually use files people can OPEN with common utilities like notepad" they think "Hey, you know what we should do? We should make a NEW file type no system has ever seen before, that way when people try to edit them their OS will go "DUR, DUR, DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRR" because FUCK those people."
EDIT: Figured it out, please excuse the rage, BFEL lost many good Kerbals to bullshit aero today