[Acer Iconia A500] Neoprimal:
I don't know if you're seriously having issues or are just feeling disenfranchised at this point and looking to rant - but your rant turned into a whine after a few posts and it makes me not that interested in putting out the effort to help, just because of your whole tone. But I shall go ahead and throw in some suggestions anyway.

I will say that everyone is different, and I suppose what fits the goose may not fit the gander.

I have an A500 with 3.2 and I have no issues. I am reading a few users saying they have wake and sleep issues which I did way back in 3.0.x, but for me these issues are gone. There tends to be a WEE bit of lag when picking up and using the tablet after it's been sitting for a long time but that's as far as the problems go and this lag or choppiness goes away almost instantly once I open the file drawer.

Now, that being said....if 1 person has issues and another doesn't then the variable can only be 1 or a few of several things, 1. broken hardware 2. variance of apps installed and 3. how the system was initialized.

If you're having issues with lag in portrait mode, consider the possibility that you have a rogue app or some app that's either sucking down memory or cpu cycles. I don't have this problem and many users are saying they don't either so blaming it on HC is completely pointless.

The second thing is the music player. You're absolutely right - the default music player should play music whether the tablet's screen is on or off. I haven't tested this since all of my music is in the cloud and the only time I put them to SD is when I travel, but either way I use Doubletwist which is free and for me, works when I need it to. I'm going to perform some tests to see if local music stops when the screen goes off. I know for sure that none of my radio apps, Google Music or 2Player stop as I tend to leave music playing on the tablet when I go to bed.

Now, regarding the browser, you're not the first person I've seen complain but again not everyone has these problems so try other things. I used to bounce between the stock browser which at one point would sync with my desktop Chrome, but that feature broke and I switched completely to Dolphin, that browser works well.

I don't have a lag problem on the tablet, heavy task or not so the fact that you do means something else is going on. My suggestion is to bite the bullet and do a factory reset and start over. There's an app I use called watchdog, I don't know if it has a free version but mine I got free from Amazon and it basically reports to me, any app eating up cpu or memory cycles and you'd be surprised the kind of apps you may have holding back your system. Generally apps that aren't HC optimized are generally the culprits. Also look in your running apps to see just how many programs you're using that have a task sitting there running 24/7 in memory.

If you remain unhappy with HC, so be it. I do think ICS will make a big enough difference in terms performance despite the fact that it's mostly a unifying of HC and Android for phones. There are under the hood changes that should allow for a smoother GUI and such but you have to be prepared for a longish wait in terms of ironing bugs out, period. One of the sacrifices we make as those embracing Android, is some bugs here and there, it's one OS to fit several devices, most of which contain different parts - the benefits outweigh the cost, imho. We get to buy various devices from various brands with various features all to our choosing. The alternative to Android at this point is iOS which is definitely less buggy but comes along with its own sacrifices to make as well, that or tablets running Windows 7.