> 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:
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:
https://www.blender.org/download/lts/
Bugs fixes will be added but no new features.