Problem you may be having, or feature you want: Not a problem, and a really minor thing, maybe not worth implementing, but it would be convenient if the number of podcast episodes about to be deleted would be shown before confirming deletion (as well as after, which is currently done). Sometimes, I might not want to delete if I knew how many were about to be deleted (maybe I do not want to delete so many, maybe I do not want to delete so few).
Suggested solution: include number of episodes to be deleted in the Delete played dialog, before confirming deletion. However, keep the number of files just deleted in the toast that appears after confirming.
I have automatic deletion off. This is owing to mostly listening to podcasts while on the move (usually walking or driving). Sometimes, I want to re-listen to specific podcast episode, or read the episode notes, after listening. This is very awkward to do if the episode is automatically deleted after having listened to several episodes during a walk or drive.
By manually deleting played episodes, I can first, reset the playback position of an interesting episode (marking the episode as un-played, so that it is not deleted with the rest of the played episodes), or read the episode notes of an interesting episode, before deleting them all. This is very handy and much more convenient than having to either re-download interesting episodes or browse through a podcast feed to re-find interesting episode that were auto-deleted.
The feature, as it currently is, is quite wonderful.
In the absence of that feature part of my weekly (or so) app housekeeping is to multi-select and delete older played episodes. Anything over a week old goes.
To avoid the manual housekeeping I’ve gone ahead and enabled automatic deletion. If I want to listen to something again I just stream or download it from Playback History the same way I would from the Inbox.