There's no new version out. Rate-limiting could be done, but right now I can't distinguish between "user keeps the button pressed" and "user presses the button rapidly". And in the second case, it could be annoying if the user wants to switch between apps quickly.

The "nice animation" is something that's totally dependent on the window manager (mcompositor / swipeplugin), I didn't do anything there.

As far as excluding the home screen view from the application switching goes, this could be implemented (to exclude it from the list), but I thought it was kind of nice to have it in there. I'll think about maybe removing it in a future version - but first, I think I'll have a look at systemui (thanks qwazix for the great idea!). Swiping left/right on the statusbar seems doable, I'd just need to figure out where the input handling for that is (help here is welcome of course).