passages were a bit longer i think than what i'm used to in ek and in terms of finding the main idea, i think there were 1-2 passages where i was like wtf did i just read...other than that nothing out of the ordinary. The science related ones were very easy to read through though.
I agree with you ek is definitely much easier to read (aside from the one or two hard esoteric literary/social issue etc ones per exam) but i haven't found tpr too bad to understand the main idea and i'm almost done all of the individual passage based ones (have been getting 1-3 wrong/passage) though. Tpr though does do a good job of making ambiguous answers that are ambiguous enough to match the aamc's style...i think far better than ek does. I just finished ek 7 and there was one entire passage where i didn't get the main idea and missed like 4 questions where usually with tprh verbal workbook i only miss 1-3/passage which tells me that i understand the main idea but just missed "touchy feely ones" --> ie closer to aamc style.
Aamc > tprh vb > ek >berkley> kaplan