Agreed, textarea performance is much improved, however, it's not doing anything with styles like bold & italics (hopefully this isn't why it's so much faster!).
That's strange, after Skid applied the SetStyle fix for v0.27, they have been working fine for me. In my MaxIDE, I have Keywords in bold, and comments in italics. Are you sure you've sync'd to v0.28?
Oh, and I love the way toolbar icons grey out rather than simply block out.
Same here! :-)