Alright, I know I'm going to get slammed for this again, but I'll go ahead and say it: this was an entirely predictable situation, due to what I believe was a poor design choice on Jolla's part. In short:

The Jolla "Home Screen" tries to combine task-manager functionality with widget functionality. And it shouldn't.

It is a nice dream, one single screen that can do _everything_. The problem, of course, is that eventually everything tends to interfere with everything else; each app cover needs some level of interactivity in order to do widget-like functionality, but the home screen itself needs at least a few overall controls in order manage the running tasks, and you need still another level of interactivity in order to manage the various screens. Eventually, something's got to give.

Before now, Jolla got away with this by severely constraining the widget-like controls, and having a very minimalist system for moving between screens. Now that they've shifted to provide a more complex set of screens for the user, they've adapted the home screen by constraining the widget-like controls even further.

I still think the best way to remedy this situation is to separate the widget and task manager functions, freeing the various gestures back up again for their use in either role. Jolla could do this by making the home screen "modal" (switching between widget and task manager modes), or by creating a separate "widget screen" (much like the Dashboard in OS X)...