Auto-downloads work wonderfully here and can even be set per-podcast which is such a nice feature.
Not saying this to denigrate your experience but to perhaps soften the ‘is horrific’ notion into somewhat more of a ‘does not work for you’ one. Otherwise, I suppose Pocket Casts is also open source nowadays - or has always been and I did not notice? But that was a reasonably good alternative for me as well before I switched to AntennaPod.
I have similar issues. Guess it’s because I listen to vary long podcasts that I often don’t finish, because there’s a newer episode already. Because of that old episodes will be considered unfinished and block new ones from getting downloaded. Maybe if there download limit is set to e.g. 20 Antenna Pod should delete the oldest episode of the 20 downloaded and download the newest one when it gets released
