Yamaha 7.1 Receiver with 8K HDMI & Dolby Atmos

I've been a Yamaha receiver fan for years. I thought I'd get on the 8k trend early with this one. After hooking up the system, I immediately noticed that voices weren't coming through when watching movies unless you hit the in party mode button. I typically run optical back from the TV when casting, but upon hooking up the HDMI cable for other devices; it defaulted to the arc connection. This is simply terrible and not pleasant at all. While the HDMI is plugged in and the audio source is the TV; the audio skips every 10-15 seconds and seems to get worse the longer you watch something. The only way to fix is to remove the HDMI cable entirely. As an added feature, when running audio through the optical, it won't detect it's doing anything and enter standby after the timeout period. I've run the updates and there's no change in behavior. I'm really disappointed in this product.