trying to find a new podcast app

Try Overcast

I don't know if it can do what you want though, but it does have nice features like volume boost and speed and another one I can't remember at the moment, basicly if you skip forwards and backwards it will try to land between the words, i'm not sure how to explain it.

You can create smart playlists. You add podcasts on them and their episodes appear on the playlist and you can play them in a queue or just pick one to listen to.

Hi,
have you heard of downcast?
Perhaps, you could try it.
Castro & icatcher are also good.

I use iCatcher, and it allows you to set playlist priorities by podcast. I don't do this, so I can't give details, but I see the sorting options are there. The developer is very responsive, and accessibility is great.
and

Hi, I used the native Apple Podcasts app for years, until a couple of months ago when I heard about Castro. Although it has a yearly subscription fee to enable all the features, I'm so glad I took out that subscription. Being able to queue up episodes in the order in which I wish to listen to has been a game-changer for my podcast listening. Once you have subscribed to podcasts, new episodes will show up in the new tab, and you can clear episodes you don't wish to hear, and queue the ones you wish to listen to in the order you want. Then if you still want to change the order, you go into the queue tab, and you can drag and drop the episodes in whatever order you wish them to be played. I've found that handy with a medical podcast that has over it's 200 episodes, covered a vast amount of topics. Being able to sort these into an order of the topics I wanted to hear first, has made it easier for me to listen to episodes on the same topic, so I have a more succinct understanding of the subject matter. You can also set Castro to notify you when new episodes become available. You simply flick down once on the notification to view, then you get a dialogue that looks like that in the new tab, so you can queue next, queue last, or clear the episode out of your queue, so you don't have to listen to that episode at all. I'm also happy that Castro has chapter support for podcasts that cover a lot of topics in one show.

I think it's just cause I either payed for or downloaded overcast for free, I can't remember, and got used to it.

I'd recommend overcast too :)

trying castro now, but I can't import my opml file into castro as it says no valid audio file found. I've not gotten that error before. Help?