Podcasts Not Downloading to Apple Watch after watchOS 6 Update

I don't know whether to throw my iPhone, Apple Watch or both at a wall. This is so maddening! Everything was working great until iOS 13 and/or watchOS 6. There is definitely a bug. 13.1 did nothing to resolve this. Here's a list of crazy things I'm witnessing:

1) The list of downloaded episodes on the iPhone do not always show up on the list of episodes for certain shows on the watch when you go into Library/Shows. Some episodes show up on the watch on the list of Episodes. When you try to listen to some from there, the app quits. The watch does not mirror the phone, that's for sure.

2) If I get an updated episode on the iPhone, it gets saved to the watch with no cloud icon. If you listen to the episode for just a few seconds on the iPhone and the watch is being charged nearby, it syncs the episode as played and you can't play it on the watch. The cloud icon reappears for that episode even if it was not there before.

3) It seems that if you subscribe to a new podcast that has existing/past episodes, those download to the phone and they show up on the watch but show the cloud icon. When you click to play on the watch, the app quits. Some however, work which is baffling to me. One thing I have noticed is that new episodes that arrive for this new podcast do get saved to the watch and you can listen to them. It's as though only newly received episodes get saved to the watch, nothing from the past even if you haven;t listened to any of them.

This is a complete mess. I can't believe Apple would botch someting that was already working fine. I hope Apple is aware of this and that they find a fix. I bought the watch mainly to listen to podcasts and not have to lug my phone around all the time.

Thanks for your suggestions. I have indeed deleted and reinstalled the podcast app on the iPhone. The iPhone podcast app is behaing fine and I can play all podcasts. I also unpaired the watch, deleted the watch app on the iPhone, reinstalled app and re-paired. Same issue. My wife has the same watch and iPhone and she has the same issue. There's a bug with this update as I never had the issue before. I've had some more time to understand what's going on. Here's what I see happening:

Today, a few of my podcast shows had updated episodes. These episodes were downloaded to the iPhone and the watch. On the watch, the cloud icon is gone telling me that the episode has been saved to the watch's memory. I can play these episodes on the watch from Library. When I'm listening to these locally stored podcast, the signal icons turns constantly. Never noticed that before.

Episodes that were previously downloaded to the iPhone (i.e. they were on the iPhone after I reset the watch), will not get stored to the watch. They appear on the watch in Library but the cloud icon shows for these. Some I can play streaming, others, the app quits for some reason. Even if I delete an episode and re-download it and even set "Mark as unplayed", they still will not save to the watch.

In the watch app, I have set "Add Episodes From" as "Custom" with every show toggled. It should save all episodes on the iPhone to the watch but it doesn't. Even for some shows, the watch is missing some episodes that are on the iPhone and downloaded. They don't show up at all on the watch. For what it's worth, the list of episodes on the iPhone in Listen Now does not fully correspond to what's on the watch, even if I select Listen Now for Add Episodes From.

Something's not right.

Just installed iOS13.1 and this issue was not resolved. Let us know what Apple says.

Thanks for the tip. I downloaded Overcast and it seems to work fine. I'm done with the Apple podcast app for now.