I'm curious, is there a lot of pressure to use the latest version of Blender? Back when I was a kid, I stuck with a certain version of 3DS Max to avoid exactly that type of problem. But I'm not familiar with Blender, so maybe it's not so straightforward just to stick with the old one you know.
As far as I can tell, there's no pressure at all unless you are asking for help with a problem that a newer version solved.
I love that they maintain a page with links to download all the older versions. Today's news reminded me to try one of the legacy 32-bit builds on my Puppy Linux netbook next time I'm playing on it, because Blender is a really fun tool once you learn the ropes, and has been since I started using it (2002-ish).
My issue is that the last year or two has seen a huge amount of technical improvements that I genuinely love.
Those improvements are combined with UI and workflow changes which are big enough changes that you can't fully copy over your old defaults.
I'm still using the new versions, and some of the workflow changes are genuine improvements as well. But I can mirror the GP comment of spending an hour googling something that I knew how to do by muscle memory in an older version. With the majority of results being older than a few months and not showing the current way to do it.
*Edit: in the time I wrote this comment the GP comment appears to have been flagged (I don't recall if it said anything overly mean or anything, that may have something to do with it if so). The concern about the UI and workflow changes is real and has been brought up for a couple of years now however ([1], among others)
> is there a lot of pressure to use the latest version of Blender?
Post 2.8, not hugely, AFAICT (outside of the desire to use new features). Older released versions are always available even back to SGI/Irix releases that are presumably primarily of historical interest.
The Blender team has an awareness of the potential disruption that arises from being forced to upgrade in the middle of a typical multi-year film/video project, so now explicitly cater for this use case with their new Long Term Support (LTS) versions pilot:
