I noticed that. I miss working with floating edges, but I can deal. I guess the takeaway is if I see a floating edge, it's time to ctrl+x the heck out of there.
I have the split tool assigned to ctrl-w, I don't recall having to do anything special to get that to work, I'll post back if I can think of something. Agreed that's super annoying about the preferences; I've never understood why the save button in the prefs doesn't write to the file. (or at least give us a button for it…