Next releases battery life will be even better
I've got people at XDA who are working on a battery patch and it's great so far
As for Google Now voice, I have to rewrite the boot loader to resize the system partition. The issue is that the partition is only 190MB so after you install the ROM and you try using Google Apps, it runs out of space. Of course it wont tell you this, but if you open the Terminal Emulator and run "df" it will show that you have 4KB left on system. So what happens is it goes folder folder. It can't even finish the /system/app folder so it never even gets to /system/lib which contains all the Google Now voice libraries. And the Chrome ones too I assume. SO I have to rewrite the boot loader to change the partition size.
About the animations: Qualcomm released the Adreno Libs for JB ARMv7 devices yesterday. I highly doubt they will release them for ARMv6 as they dropped support for that. So I've gotta port the new Adreno Libs to ARMv6. WIll hopefully have some progress by the next build