I guess if you're a very casual podcast listener, and with the lack of proper migration path it can be confusing, but a dedicated Podcast app makes a lot more sense than the half-assed "podcast is music" integration that GPM had. If you've never tried it, a real podcast app is orders of magnitude better. Speed controls, feed management, silence trimming, auto download, archiving, etc.
The lack of kids support is very true. The free tier also was quite trash for a long time, and the lack of desktop casting. Most of these have been since fixed though and at this point I would say YTM has feature parity.
Recommendation is always hard to discuss as it's very subjective. That being said, YTM has great playlists. It automatically clusters your music into 7 playlists which is describes with 4-5 artist names. There's discovery, replay and new release mixes which are great too.
Overall, I agree GPM got shut down way too soon, but at this point YTM has made a lot of progress vs what it was 2 years ago.
> GPM had podcast integration. Being a cloud service, it synced state to all my devices.
Wasn't that just moved to Google Podcasts? (Although, something like PocketCasts IMO is a better service.)
I had no idea that existed. From my perspective, the feature vanished into thin air. I wasn't a heavy podcast listener so this was kind of a Google Reader situation; I simply stopped listening to podcasts.
Until last month, kids could not use YTM. With the family plan, this was basically a DOS for years (or setup new kids accounts and lie about their age).
IMO, GPM's recommendations were much better.
We kept the family plan because of YTP and my wife and I still had access to music.