I have a 525 myself, and I wouldn't say it's fluid. WP8 worked without a single hitch on it, and this is a little noticably sluggish.
But I'd say it's worth the new features of WP 8.1, so I'm not going back to WP8. Hopefully, Lumia Cyan would improve things.
Soft reset didn't really improve things, and I'm not doing a hard reset. Too many games with saves that I don't want to lose.did you tried a soft reset or hard reset ?