I couple of other things:

I notice that, while doing "Check for new episodes", youtube subscriptions take a lot longer (about 10-11 seconds each) than other RSS subscriptions (less than a second each), on a fast Wi-Fi network. Is that just inherent to youtube? I mean, is the delay at their end, or is there anything that can be done in the gpodder code to speed this up?

While noticing the above problem, I also notice that the text on the progress bar says "Updated XXXX on youtube" when I think it should say "Updating" instead. That is, it seems to say that it has "updated" a particular subscription when in fact it's only just started to check it. Of course, this wouldn't be very visible as a problem if it wasn't for the delay mentioned above which gives me a long time to stare at the progress bar!