Fast forwarding isn't an issue for me. I don't have scores of long tracks like ravetek. But I have noticed the lack of the Xing tag with VBR, which I recently started using. But LAME claims that it must disable that tag in order for the --nogap switch to work properly, so I'm happy to make the trade-off. The only thing I see is that the empeg (and WINAMP) can't always correctly tell me the time (mm:ss) of the track that's playing. Slightly annoying, but not all that important to me.

Edit: As for upgrading to 2b11 and Hijack - I have heard about many great new features, but everyday I check the board there's always a new report about some bug or another, so I'm still just a little skeptical.