Well, it appears after letting things run over night my $session stuff is looking better this morning.
But I have noticed something odd upon reverting to an older version- my search fields are being cached. Typically I have them pop out in a modal with information and upon closing the modal you are able to search for a new term, but for some reason it is now searching the old value instead. If you manually refresh the grid, it populates. Just an odd behavior.
Edit: Ignore this, found this lovely post and it resolved my issue. Forgot about Sync-UDElement.