Thunderbird vs. Gmail

I spent about five hours today setting up Thunderbird to get messages from my gmail account. Most of that time was spent creating filters. I don't mind Thunderbird so far, but I have some small issues with it:

• Viewing labeled messages is a pain. As far as I can tell, there's no way to see all the messages I've marked with a particular label if they're in different folders. I'd like to use marking for reminding myself what emails I need to reply to, but it doesn't help if I can't see them all at once. It seems dumb to set up a folder to store messages I need to reply to. At the very least, a colored marker next to a folder than contains a marked message would be helpful.
• Only five labels? Come on.
• If I have a subdirectory, the parent directory doesn't show how many unread messages there are in the subdirectories.
• When I delete one message, I don't want to open the next message.
• I keep getting duplicate messages from gmail. I think it's related to changing my POP settings in gmail. Hopefully it will only re-download messages once.
• At first I thought Thunderbird ate some messages in a folder. The view was set to All, but I tried resetting it again. Turns out the view was really on "unread" instead. No message loss, simply a rendering/updating bug.
• More rendering bugs with drop down menus. A couple times, a newly added folder wouldn't get displayed on a drop down menu. It would show up as a blank space instead, and wouldn't expand to show any subfolders.

I should probably look to see if anyone has reported these bugs yet, but I need to start my technical writing homework.

The reason I'm switching to Thunderbird is so I can send patches to the USB mailing list and Greg K-H. It's still a pain to use Thunderbird for creating messages with patches in them, but at least I can sign emails with my gpg key. Gmail still doesn't have that capability.