The structure of the puzzle made it very quick, in some ways it felt more like a Monday.
Hey! A Thursday I won’t complain about. 
Yeah, pretty easy. I got hung up on the lower left with a couple of mistakes that screwed some things up, but I still ended up with my new best time for a Thursday, eleven minutes and change.
Not quite as zippy as @pulykamell, that’s for sure! Nicely done, there.
Hard to say without a basis for comparison. But it sounds like they follow the same schedule as the NYT: Get harder through the week, Thursday has a gimmick, Friday has a theme to the long answers, Saturday is straightforward but just plain hard.
Well, reading over at Rex’s site, it does seem this Thursday’s puzzle created a lot of new Thursday records, and was pretty much universally panned as an underwhelming Thursday with poor fill and no challenge. I was not surprised at all to see Rex hate the puzzle, but pretty much all the commentators disliked it as well. I thought it was a decent puzzle, though I do agree the fill was a bit garbage-y in places, I still enjoyed the solve, though I like my Thursdays with a bit more fight in 'em.
Yeah, usually, there’s a gimmick plus some trickiness. This one was all gimmick. I guess the hard part is that you only have half the clues for the across answers, which could make it harder, but they over-compensated by making the rest of it too easy.
I just noticed that I got a personal best as well for Thursday. And skimming through the comments section on the website, it seems we are not alone in that!