How do I hide old podcasts in iTunes 11.1 and What's Up with the New Podcast Pane?

Question

FIrst of all, I'm having fits with this "new" way of managing podcasts.
For years, I have managed the podcasts on my iPod (and now my iPhone 5) by manually syncing the device with my subscribed podcasts in iTunes. I have iTunes set to download the most recent episode of each of my podcasts and to keep all episodes until I delete them. Some podcasts I listen to or view only my MacBook Pro and I don't sync these to my iPhone. This has worked fine for years.
I moved to Apple's dedicated Podcasting app when I purchased my iPhone 5 earlier this year, but I maintained the manual syncing as I had done, using the app only to play the podcasts, not to subscribe to or download them.
I upgraded my iPhone 5 and iPad 3 to iOS 7 on launch day and downloaded iTunes 11.1 to my MacBook Pro, running OS X 10.8.5. The iOS upgrades went flawlessly for both of my devices, but iTunes has been a problem. It was sluggish when I first opened it, with lots of spinning beach balls. When I opened it for the first time, I went to the Podcast section and to my list of podcasts. They all now had "Subscribe" buttons by each of them (I was already subscribed to the podcasts in iTunes before the update). I assumed that I had to click the buttons to activate subscriptions in iTunes, but low and behold I discovered that it subscribed my iPhone 5's podcast app to ALL of the podcasts in my list (even ones that I don't put on the iPhone). It also started DOWNLOADING all of the episodes of these podcasts to my iPhone which, had I let it continue, would have eaten all of my bandwidth on Verizon for the month (and then some), plus the iPhone would have been filled up long before it could finish downloading the episodes.
I managed to get the iPhone's Podcast app to stop downloading these episodes, then I manually deleted all of the podcasts that didn't belong on the iPhone. I then had to go through all of the podcasts in the app and click a yellow box that said they hadn't been updated and wouldn't resum updating until I clicked the box.
Then I went back to iTunes 11.1, where I discovered that ALL the podcast episodes for my subscriptions that are still available for download in their feeds were now listed (2,000+ episodes), with previously listened-to episodes now showing with a cloud download icon next to them. Even more frustrating, I can't delete these from iTunes even though I've already listened to them and, even more frustratingly, the "Subscribe" button remains by each podcast in the list.
All I want to do is remove these previously-listened to podcasts from my lists, remove the subscribe buttons (since I'm already subscribed in iTunes), and continue to manually sync my iPhone's podcasts with iTunes as before. What do I have to do to make this happen? And if these are new "features" of the new iTunes, please share with your team that, while there are many who update wirelessly over their cell carrier's bandwidth, others of us don't have the capability (or desire) to do things this way and we want to switch this off and return to the "old" way of doing things.
Any ideas on how to fix iTunes 11.1 to return to the old way of doing things would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

What really cheeses me off here is that Apple isn't allowing users enough customization.  With each update of iTunes (and the OS and iOS) we're forced to give up something that worked well for the way we want to use the app and make do with fewer (and lamer) options.  If Apple keeps this up, they're going to start losing customers fast.  I mean if this isn't fixed soon, I'm pretty sure I'm going to give up on iTunes, and then I'll probably go ahead and get a Galaxy when I need to replace my iPhone.
What I don't understand about how they won't let users delete the list of available podcasts now is why?  How is this making it a better program?  I can understand that not all users are capable enough to right-click on a feed and select "Show all available episodes", so I can see why they want the complete list to be the default (and, surprise, it already was).  But to not give users the option to delete that list?  It's inconsiderate because it makes navigating feeds with a large back catalogue really frustrating.  I'm flabbergasted that no one at Apple considered all the podcast feeds that keep hundreds of episodes available when they removed this feature.  It smacks of rank incompetence.
What improvement were they trying to make here anyway?  There was nothing wrong to my mind about how podcasts were managed in previous versions.  Whatever improvement they were trying to make here, they should have realized that many users would at least want the option to keep things the way they were.
And reverting to a previous version is no solution.  I can't sync my iPhone with the new iOS without this update, and (while I do have some issues--specifically how you can't play podcasts in the Music app anymore) I do like the new iOS.