nah, only if you're used to backgrounds on playlists like i am. i used to have a dark one which looked pretty and was nice on the eyes, then with the new update it was removed and was replaced by a blaring white screen underneath my titles. otherwise there are no real changes
yep, if you set a picture as the playlist thumbnail, there'd be a heavily blurred copy of that image in the background. so i had a dark album cover set as the thumbnail