Well, at least you can still *get* .35... it's still popular with various leverguns and the Contender crowd.
I had my Model 8 nearly six months before I managed to score from overpriced .30 Remington brass.
The straight-wristed "traditional" stock of the Model 8 took me a bit to get used to, but it sure shoots nice.
My only complaint about the rifle is that the feed lips are *way* down inside the receiver; it's easy to snag a fingernail trying to push loaded rounds down in there. Now I understand why JMB set it up for stripper clips. And I'm fairly sure those removable magazine conversions weren't as much for swapping out mags - I've never seen a spare mag for a converted 8 - as they were for ease in loading the magazine.
When I first disassembled the rifle I was bemused to find how similar the innards were to my AKs. A lot of people claim that Mikhail Timofeyovich copied various German designs, but if there was any copying done, he was looking much further West. The details are different, of course - JMB's designs tended to be baroque and expensive to manufacture, while MTK's were highly optimized for economy of production - but other than gas vs. recoil operation, they're close cousins.
As for shooting the Model 8 - yes, the "double thump" of the recoil mechanism is noticeable. Didn't bother me at all, but the friend I was shooting with was disconcerted at first. He was shooting a Winchester levergun in .30-30. The .30-30 and .30 Remington use the same loading data, but the recoil on the Model 8 was *much* less bothersome; the recoil mechanism "smears" the recoil pulse over a longer time so the kick isn't as sharp.