Ugh, sinister, but GREAT!
Well, I did make some major changes to both fluids and smudge. Fluids have different drying behavior, which now is far more controllable than before, though, I'm not too happy about what happens when they dry completely.
Smudge has a temporarily fixed pressure (on opacity) behavior, which has pressure control softness by a 50% range from the dialed up fluid smudge value. Since this is a reverse value, full pressure is the dialed up amount and least pressure goes to 50% above that to be softer then. I adjusted it to act in that 50% way to accommodate Ed's complaint, so... if you have pressure on opacity on and you want more of the "old feel", dial fluid smudge down to 0-10%. ALSO, all this only acts that way with fluidity 0-50%. Everything above 50% acts as before.
If you want fluid drying to act more like earlier, you have to set the drying speed very, very low. Also, the other change I did actually for you, which was to lessen the problem of color to background behavior. Another thing is that when you smudge wet paint into dry paint, the dry paint will get wetter, while if you smudge dry into wet, the wetness will maintain dominance, which feels a lot more natural.
Later on I will try to make as much of it customizable as possible, because every behavior has its advantages and drawbacks. There will be an "expert mode" for sure!