Ok, so here is the good, bad and ugly.

1. Airport was chaos on departure, over 2 hours to drop a bag - that's on Transat though.
2. Outbound crew were decent, giving full cans of soda, helpful when people asked questions
3. Return crew were the polar opposite, clearly too good to serve mere plebs their food and drinks, stony faces, curt responses. Half plastic glasses of soda, only allowed a single drink at a time (so no coffee and a juice for example). Cannot remember the time I was last denied both a hot and cold drink.
4. Food was dire on both, with the exception of the veggie calzone as the snack on the return which was decent.
5. No in flight entertainment. On the return (daytime) they had the tv drop from the ceiling with the route map. Guessing they didn't at night because it would just have been annoying
6. Nice big loo by boarding door, space to swing a cat!
7. Return boarding was utter chaos, not sure who it was, not Transat but didn't look like Hi Fly either, ground agency?
8. They measured everyone's bag in Lisbon with a silly cardboard pop over thing - my bag is plenty legal for Transat, but only fitted with brut force. I was not checking it - a lot of people had to tho!
9. Overhead on the outbound was fine, return was rammed (despite their checking of hand luggage). Crew would not allow anyone to store anything in club, despite the cabin being empty, even when people said they were happy not to access it in flight. Absurd - I get it when the cabin is full / occupied, but there were about 3 people in there out of 30+ seats and corresponding overhead.
10. Seat were very uncomfortable, and clearly 30 years old! Outbound seat had a broken plastic side bit that dug into my thigh, Return was stuck in front of the vertical so was leaning forward - I am sore today! Every time the person behind reached into their seat pocket I got a bit of an X rated grope tho - zero padding, just the fabric!
11. Pitch was decent, no worse than other flights. ~32" if I had to guess. It did help that the people in front did not recline into me - definitely tighter if they had have done so as it was the older tippy back seats, rather than those that move themselves a little forward. Width was fine.
12. It took over 2 hours for bags to come out in Lisbon. Ground handling were farcical in how inept they were with dealing with customers (take a ticket, deli style, no worries). They served 1 number in over an hour - there were 3 people in the office. When people went in they mockingly told people to wait for their number, and laughed out loud when someone mentioned their number (about 12 ahead of the current number).

Transat rep on board (not entirely sure why other than they must have had a ton of complaints!) said they would be operating the route for at least another 6 weeks.

Hope this helps someone!