I have the feeling the tape crossfades aren’t exactly an improvement. You used to be able to keep a perfect loop after lifting a tape section and then dropping a few one after the other. But when you do this on 1.6.2 you get noticeable gaps. You can work around this by shift+dropping.
What I always found to be amazing about the OP-1 is that you could cut of the tail end of a sound on the tape, shift+dropping it on the start, and still keep a perfect loop. But on 1.6.2 this also has a clear gap instead of a smooth transition.
Unfortunately I can’t compare it with 1.5 because downgrading my OP-1 gives an error on screen.