OK... so big discovery. I just installed a program called diamond tweak 0.5 with the link here
http://forum.xda-developers.com/show...ghlight=sprint . this program has an option among many others to enable the dpad for scrolling.
Im not sure whether it is disabled (according to the program it is turned off by default) but anyway I am happy to report that after enabling the dpad it now works much better... Not perfect but 60% better. Huge improvement that I thought I would share!!!
Hope this helps. Let me know if it works for you?