I also don't understand why they did away with this feature. I agree the search feature is definitely not the best way to switch notebooks -- I find that sometimes I have to type the entire name of the notebook before it appears and notebooks are always at the bottom of the list. I also have a lot of notebooks making using the notebook browser inefficient. The dropdown of the notebook was great and greatly missed. Very sad about this.
I have this issue too after cutting and pasting from a PDF -- Make Plain Text doesn't resolve the issue. Is there any resolution?
Very frustrating, as I frequently use evernote to take quotes out of PDFs.