I bought an Amazon Fire tablet exclusively for Pocket use as well.

Something did change maybe about year and a half ago about rendering articles. It felt like less and less of them were rendering in article mode, and I needed wifi access to read articles in the original format. Before that practically everything rendered in article mode, afterwards I would say it was about 50%.

yeahs, the offline caching got terrible. its text that (rarely) changes. I have no idea why the mobile app couldn't just remember what each url was, even if it was 6 weeks stale.

Also, Pocket couldn't create reader views for many websites (like hacker news discussions), which means the TTS was useless.

Oh and the TTS required an internet connection.