I have fooled around with ecto 2 for a couple of days now and I like it just fine. The interface is completely different but somehow familiar.
The only gotchas I have found had to do with posting times and image uploading. For some reason, I couldn’t get posts to publish as they were posted: there was a 7 hour (difference from GMT) offset, so they were scheduled to publish 7 hours hence. I ripped out the whole install (suspecting I had perhaps not removed ecto 1’s various config data properly) and reconfigured it. After that, everything worked just fine.
Image uploading in WordPress now works, but that was never ecto’s fault: it was a missing feature in WordPress, but just last week I found a patch to address that and it works like a champ. The only thing I haven’t figured out is how to control the size of the thumbnail that gets generated. I knew where that was in the original ecto, but I’m not finding it now . . .
So far, so good. It’s solid and featureful without being bloated.