mrsixw -- Are you referring to the new "Symbol Coloring Scheme" options, found in Options-->Appearance-->Colors? If so, you can simply turn off the symbol coloring by selecting "(None)" at the top of the drop-down list of symbol coloring schemes; then only the overall edit-window text coloring scheme chosen in the "Scheme" drop-down (above the "Symbol Coloring Scheme" drop-down) will apply, exactly as in SE 13.
I haven't yet encountered the behaviour you mention in the new Open dialog, but I've too little usage to judge.
One thing that has been suggested elsewhere in this forum to improve the snappiness of SE is reducing the number of symbol lookups made by the context tagging mechanisms that are constantly working in the background. I use a rather underpowered (by today's standard) uniprocessor (AMD Turion 1.6GHz/1MB cache) laptop with plenty of memory (2G), but setting these defaults in Options-->Editing-->Context Tagging gave an appreciable speed-up: max. candidates for list parameters=50, max. class/struct members shown in list=100, max. funcs. found by parameter help=50, globals shown in list members=50, max. items found in ref. search=512, max. tags found in symbol search=500.
And some of those could be even more reduced, depending on the complexity of the code and the numbers of files you are dealing with.
Also, increasing the max. tag file cache size to something larger than the sum total of all the tag files you may be using at any time definitely helps with snappy performance.
There's no doubt that SE is getting more and more complex with each new version, with more stuff going on under the hood (it's no longer a 1960s Volkswagen Beetle text editor, it's becoming mini-van-like, with too many coffee cup holders everywhere, and multi-media distractions for the kids
), but you can still trim it down and switch many things off that you may not need (but once tried, are hard to give up). (Insert warning about global warming footprint here.)