I do not mind the animated menu scrolling as I think you can actually "run ahead of it" without penalty.
However, something that others have noted is that recent versions of the software have implemented a slight delay before your buttonpress "takes". For instance, you press and release the button, but the menu doesn't actually register the buttonpress and begin moving until about 200ms later.
I'm pretty sure this is due to their need to determine whether or not the button was pressed, or pressed-and-held.
However, when scrolling left and right in a menu, press-hold has no meaning, so I don't think the delay needs to be present for L/R once your inside the menu. I submitted this as a bug on the internal bug list, and I think it even got marked as "fixed", but this behavior still seems to be present in Beta11.