For me it's exactly the opposite. While js and render performance might have been worse, scrolling has become more and more choppy with every chrome release while Firefox has absolutely no issues (even without quantum)

There certainly is hardware acceleration in Firefox on Linux, more then likely it has been disabaled because of your configueration/set-up/drivers. To turn it on go into your "about:config" and toggle the entry "layers.acceleration.force-enabled" to "True" and restart. Then Firefox is as fast as Chrome or faster, simple as that. Although it would be nice if there was a dialog telling the user their setup is incorrect/unsupported and giving them the option whtout digging into the config, I believe this is the number one reason people think FF is slower, cause their HW acceleration is disabled and they don't even know it is...

>There certainly is hardware acceleration in Firefox on Linux, more then likely it has been disabaled because of your configueration/set-up/drivers. To turn it on go into your "about:config" and toggle the entry "layers.acceleration.force-enabled" to "True" and restart.

Implying that it wasn't deliberately disabled. HW acceleration on Linux isn't enabled by default, and for good reason. Until those underlying reasons are changed, Linux does have a hardware-acceleration-on-Firefox problem.

Are there any articles that elaborate on what work still needs to be done?

yup.. enabled this option on Linux Mint 17.1, FireFox 51 .. crashed the nouveau driver 10 minutes later.. had to restart.

FF 57 is the first release of a big rewrite, I'm sure it will get VDPAU at some point, but they needed to get the base feature set stable first.