Prompted by another thread. Hope it's OK in this forum.
I have my own approach to software upgrades. It's developed over many years in commercial software package deployment, but it may not be so applicable in this world. Be interested in other approaches and rationale.
1. Ignore Beta releases Let others kick the tyres, and with YouTube around there's is lots of opportunity to watch them . Plus it might be an Alpha release () and trample on a few things you'd rather it didn't.
2. Never implement a .0 release. .0 releases come out when the marketing boys and girls say, not when the engineers want to let go. It comes out when it's good enough to produce the planned revenue.
3. Normally, the .1 bug-fix release is the first I would go for, and then wait for the next major release.
4. However, Adobe (I'm a LR user) seem to have a habit of putting in interesting enhancements in intermediate releases. These may be either bits that weren't quite ready for the .0/.1 release, or enhancements to persuade waverers. Probably both.
Do you upgrade at all?
If there are features (including RAW support for your next camera, for example) which you want, which you consider worth the upgrade cost and you are prepared for whatever the learning curve is then presumably the answer is "Yes".
If not, then there may be under the bonnet (hood!) considerations
- efficiency of other non-feature improvements (for example, the ability to better exploit more modern hardware)
- the gradual erosion of support for older versions across wide range of operating platforms (or old version won't run at all on your new computer)
- greater ease of incremental upgrade (indeed, upgrade is sometimes not possible at all from older or out of support releases)
- etc.
Generally, I prefer to upgrade sooner rather than later, but not too soon.
Any views,
Dave