1) Which wallet are you using? CLI or GUI? What's triggering the unresponsiveness?
2) Those are just minor changes, small fixes, none critical, which will all be incorporated in the next release, 3.0. Until then, 2.8.1 is still fine. But fell free to use 2.8.2 if you desire.
for example - start, sync, wait an hour, click to History => "Not Responding" occur
2) It's a good idea to put an anouncment about any changes of wallet application (just for security reasons).