Blender 4.0 was OK. New layout for principled node and modifier menu took some getting used to.
Blender 4.1 broke Shade Autosmooth replacing it with a far more complex geonodes modifier.
Then on Blender 4.2 loads on addons were moved to a website - node2code was broken, i cant find import images as planes ANYWHERE…
AND the AO material node … no longer works in EEVEE. I use this a lot as a way to add dirt tothe cracks in materials.
Anything else Ive not thought of?
Add>Image>Reference / Background / Mesh plane?
There’s a bunch of posts on this in the forum. New Eevee has some workflow changes. See also the dcos.
And yes… The new addons/extensions thing is annoying to deal with in a LTS.
It may be a confusing change at first, but it’s just as easy to install any addon directly from withing Blender, with the added benefit that you can update the addons at any moment without the usual Deactivate / Uninstall / Reload Blender / Install new version process
As for node2code broken, that’s not new, some addon creators don’t update their addons as soon as a new version of blender comes out, and there’s always changes on the python API so it’s expected that some addons take a bit longer to update after a new release is out.
This is already part of Blender, no need to activate anything, it’s on the Add/Image menu
I think what’s getting worse is that some previous global options have now become per material options, which maybe is nice for advanced users, but for more basic users (like me) it’s just a lot more clicks.
Also, having to disable raytracing just to be able to fine tune materials even in shaded mode because the viewport is so noisy (it’s almost no longer a realtime renderer). 
There is some fucking nonsense indeed. I was initially excited for Eevee’s true displacement, will allow for some cool animation possibilities. But overall, Eevee is degrading. Grain in Eevee? Wtf? Shader compilation freezing the program? Also, many material and rendering options were either moved or removed. Bloom, alpha clip, and probably dozens of curveballs I haven’t yet discovered. It is like they are trying to kill every advantage Eevee had over Cycles.
My save squence is 5 minutes, blender 4.2 LTS.
i’m upset
A huge list of improvements across the board. Just the new snapping options were a game-changer by itself.
“Blender 4.0 was OK.”
Excellent new animation workflow improvements. Broad improvements across the board in the compositor and video sequencer.
Tons of other improvements.
“Oh no! Autosmooth workflow changed!”
The end is near.
New Eevee. Improved Cycles. A new extensions platform to open up extensions to authors and the community. Update your extensions easily (this was frustrating to say the very least before)! Polyline tool! Again large feature set additions to geometry nodes and so on. MAX import addon!!!
Image to plane addon is finally no longer needed: it is now part of the default functionality Add–>Image–>mesh! Awesome!
“But AO workflow changed!”
Oh Gods. Blender is getting worse!
Truly, the Blender 4.x releases have added so many improvements. Yes, there are a things that can be improved, as it always can in any software.
But overall, it’s been impressive, and 4.x has made a massive positive impact in my workflow.
Compared to most other 3DCCs and their updates (Houdini excepted): some people tend to focus on the negatives, rather than the mountain of improvements across the board.
“Blender 4.x is getting worse!” Yeah, sure. In an alternate reality perhaps.
Disagree. The improvements in quality are night and day. At least, that how I see it.
And turning off Raytracing in 4.2 yields pretty much the same look as vanilla old Eevee without the noise, while the shadows quality is far ahead compared to old Eevee.
And it’s only the first release! Count me impressed.
I do miss the quick bloom, though.
Disabling raytrace does nothing to bunch of issues, such as broken Shader to RGB node or missing per material shadow settings. And while shadows are nice, they became another sample-reliant feature. Meaning either more grain or render times comparable to Cycles if you crank the samples up.
Generally, I think that trying to achieve parity with Cycles was a terrible idea. Eevee will never be as good at photorealism as Cycles, it is not a path tracer. They’ll better give us more options for hacks to redeem its flaws, than kill the performance with some “physical” algorithms which never work quite right. Eevee is what got me into animation because it eliminates the need of having a render farm. It will be a waste if its devs will only care for improving static pictures but not the performance
But what we haven’t got is the Bevel material node working in Eevee. This is used for edgeware, and without it and material with edgeware has to have separate settings for eevee and cycles.
P.S. Maybe I’m becoming a grumpy old man.
According to bugtracker, Shader to RGB node is not broken.
Bugs reported are about users doing weird nodetrees, not normally used to exploit Shader to RGB node or old bugreports.
It has limitations, that were the same before EEVEE-next.
Special material shadow settings that have been removed are just no more necessary. Shader nodes can handle same cases. That means that same things has been automated, and some can be replaced by nodegroups assets to be as fast as previously.
That has always been the case for soft shadows.
You can still obtain quality sharp shadows, at low samples, by reducing radius of lights.
We have lots of settings about resolution, jittering and filtering.
But whatever are scene settings, soft shadows are noisy at low and medium samples, low ray amount. Indeed, that is a regression. That is not harmless to pass from dozens of samples required to obtain soft shadows to hundreds of samples.
It’s 8 years that Blender is a mess, and you realize it today? ok 
It was a mess before that too!
I remember when people here expressed deep concern over Blender’s direction because of work on things like raytracing instead of pre 2000’s trickery like environmental maps. If there is any of the old guard left who still misses the horizontal UI (with hardcoded buttons), OOPS schematic, hardcoded hotkeys and animation channels, lack of Ngons, legacy scripts window, blinn/phong shading, basic sRGB colors with no management of any kind, interlaced and hardcoded stars rendering, ect…, then last I checked Blender can be forked from any ancient version to serve as 3D software focused on legacy technology and workflows.
The bonus, the source code back then should not even be remotely as complex or extensive as it is today.
Would you like to offer a quote, to fork 4.2 to use Eevee Legacy, instead of Eevee Next?
An issue currently is even the latest documentation about it still calls it ‘Images as Planes’ and references the old menu location.
I recently upgraded and was similarly confused.
You can help others in the community not having to deal with that by either fixing the documentation or by submitting a bug report.
All right: “Blender is constantly changing.” This means that you have to learn the new things, or adapt your workflow. If you want to participate more closely in the Blender Development process, you actually have the capacity to do so. (But: you might be outvoted.)
I started with “Blender Internal,” oh-so-many years ago, and I definitely remember the “shift-control-alt-scratch_your_nose_and_pray” days. But I am n-e-v-e-r going back!
Like you, I am astonished and sometimes taken-aback by all of the changes that seem to be happening, even between “point-one releases.” When they affect you, it’s definitely a bit of a scramble. (“Whaddaya mean, ‘EEVEE next?!’”)
While I am “displaced” by the notion of a previous version of something “entirely disappearing,” I am also a professional software developer myself. I realize that the notion of "continuing to support both at once" would add an unacceptable degree of complexity to the underlying code.
Which is why, although I mourn the loss of “Blender Internal,” I have finally accepted that – and why – it is now gone.
