Regressions galore?

Kernel 3.2 is certainly noticeably better than 3.1 and 3.0 in the interactivity regard, esp in low memory/swap situations and on high IO. But you're right in that older linux versions had better behavior in many situations - worse in others, however. Like how often it happened that one high-cpu task would hog your system and make your mouse cursor or even music skip. That rarely happens these days, with the exception of cases with high swapping.