Thanks for the thoughtful feedback! We've put a lot of work into the gestures, and during user testing most users seemed to find them intuitive. But if you have suggestions or other ideas about them we'd love to hear them.

For pull to refresh specifically, you're right that it's not really necessary -- the best way to use Prismatic is to just keep reading and scrolling down. But it's something that many users seem to look for (both on the web and on mobile), and so we decided to put it in to support this style of browsing for people who want it.