I tried to use it once and was so underwhelmed I think it lasted 2 minutes.
It totally makes sense to push people away from the service...it's not ever going to get widespread adoption without some major changes.
Of course this is not Apple's fault, but rather Conde Nast's. Background downloading never worked for me and after some googling I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one with that problem.
Manual downloads of the current issue also don't work - that is unless you stay within the app and do nothing else: read another issue while waiting? Sorry, your download is canceled. Not paused but back at the very beginning. Use another app in the meantime? Of course not! Leaving your iPad untouched and just make a coffee or something during download? Well, as soon as your iPad goes to sleep/standby the download will stop.
Of course I have to admit that I'm on a slow connection (1 megabit/s), which is a problem for several 100 MB of size per issue, but this brings me to the last flaw, which is the filesize itself. Just think about this - you're actually downloading a collection of very large PDFs. The New Yorker isn't very heavy on media and rather text-based - and while there are certain sections that come as true, lighweight and selectable text, there's no reason to ship the majority of every issue as giant images of text. It's absolutely ridiculous and unfortunately a lot of magazines are using the same Adobe digital publishing suite that results in these oversized downloads.
You could actually see the difference in size when the retina iPad was introduced.
It makes no real sense why Apple would segregate these apps, yet also allow a directory hierarchy for you to organize non-NS apps.
If Newsstand solves a genuine real-world problem, why do I not have Gamestand? I have a folder for all my games, surely a Newsstand-like UI would be a pivot on the original idea?
If it isn't scrapped in iOS 8, I don't know what's going on. The idea around the newspapers live-updating/downloading/streaming is great, carry it on without shoving it away on the back page!
The idea of "a good old newsstand full of newspapers" is something only journalists still hold.
Every other iPad magazine I've tried? Not worth the bother, but that's the publisher's fault, not Apple's. I buy some one-off issues because I'd rather not have a paper copy taking up space, but that's it. I dislike having to have an app in Newsstand just for each these, so that's something Apple could maybe improve.
[0]https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/white-dwarf/id539505817?mt=8