By pickups I mean re-recording bits where I made a mistake, usually without noticing, and none of my takes are good. I do it, but I have a lot of trouble getting myself to sit down to do it, and even more getting the edit to sound smooth.

If you tell your recording program to export the podfic with AAC encoding instead of MP3, it'll make something with the file extension .m4a, and you can just rename that as .m4b and it'll work. It's not a lot of extra effort, but then again it's also easy enough for listeners to sort .mp3s as audiobooks if they want to.

I don't think I've ever posted a podfic without adjusting the metadata in iTunes first.