I’ve been spoilt by having a server doing the heavy lifting of refreshing my podcasts. It’s a minor annoyance that I need to wait approx. 1.5 second per feed to refresh. It’s just the way it is.
In the podcast settings for each podcast, does “Keep Updated” not handle this for you? I don’t think I ever manually refresh my podcasts. Apologies if I’m misunderstanding.
Antennapod has a weird separation between new episodes (inbox) and what you’re listening to now (queue). PC has that abstracted away where you only have to check one place for your podcasts.
I don’t like the queue myself, though possibly for different reasons than you. Again possibly misunderstanding your concern, but I have “Enqueue Downloaded” and “Continuous Playback” both disabled in the Antennapod settings, and I just pretend the queue doesn’t exist.
Just throwing those things out there in the hopes they may help.