Hi Traybourne,
After reading your post I decided to do a run thru of the delta labs bit I did in high and low quality. I tried with and without the ETC1 compression and cache but didn't see any noticeable performance improvement. So next I ran the timedemo and got 16fps for with the compression and cache settings and 17.4 without it. So its a pretty minimal difference at best. I checked the flashlight too and it seemed ok with my note 2, I guess that could be a bug. Let me know if the results are about the same for you too.
It sure is

You should be able to reduce the resolution to something like 320x240 in the app's graphics menu and see if that would increase stability.