Having recently tossed my near-empty tube of AS3, I noticed several differences between the two. From a packaging perspective, one complaint I had with the previous container was that it would always "leak". That is, the compound would be at the very tip every time which eventually caused a few messes. The new packaging suffers no such fate. Also, AS5 is a lot thicker and harder to spread. Surprisingly, what seems like a few grains of sand is more than enough to cover an entire P4 core after a few minutes of spreading. I prefer to use an index card, but a finger through a plastic sandwich bag will also work.