I tracked the problem to be an incompatibility between:
The API breaks mean we're up to date with upstream, so porting applications to maemo is going to be a lot easier and maintaining current stuff (once they're up to date) will be a simpler and cleaner. Porting current applications to the new API version isn't a particularly difficult task, it just has to be done. Give this time, you're using a leaked pre-release version of the OS, so expecting all of your old applications to magically have ports available is just a tad unreasonable.
