I hope you are VERY VERY wrong because while I am on break right now I cannot wait till it is September again and I can teach my design courses this time with eeVee and the new Blender UI.
I am very curious about student reception and how they can learn the software now vs the old UI.
Considering they’re still deep in the process of banging the new UI together, I’d honestly be surprised if they managed to hit beta by September.
Come on @cekuhnen you are a much older member than me, and probably far more older user than me (I used Blender in version 1 , i think it was early 1998, way before it became open source but became really active with it only in 2005) I am sure you remember 2.5 far better than I do. Although I may be older than you in age 
It’s not a mistake to jump on 2.8 , I mean I already mentioned how quick people were to jump to the 2.5 train with all its long term instabilities and WIPs but I remember extremely few having regrets. Almost all us immediately fall in all love with 2.5 and it was the new UI. 2.8 seems to follow in the same footsteps.
So I think people jumping on 2.8 train is not a bad choice either. Actually its an excellent idea to help devs identify bugs more quickly even though their plates are more than full at the moment to be able to address all those potential bug reports.
I am not saying not embrace use of 2.8 , I am just saying it has still a long way to go , probably at least a year till it becomes really stable and I may be optimistic.
I am sure your students will love it and love you for introducing them to it. Dont worry about the bug and instabilities, its all part of doing 3d graphics. Just make sure they know how to use 2.79 as well, as a backup plan.
Enjoy the nuclear blasts, just make sure you wear your safety equipment and are at a safe distance
And talking about Game Engine rendering quality here is a small sample
My point was I hope till end auf August the apps is somewhat usable / stable enough so it will not scare students away. Pushing them through a semester of constant crashes won’t be good for their opinion but with the code quest being so focused I could also see that they through the next semester can provide a stable user experience.
Yeah 2.5 what a joy it was - instantly jumped onto it.
Cannot wait that long jahaha
I think 2.8 will be a game change for 2 very simple reason:
While Cycles is a great engine it still is slow specifically for non Cuda users.
eeVee here provides the same functionality as Autodesk VRed on a different level.
The new material system can be used by both engines which is stunning and allowing
a user to use eeVee or Cycles.
And I think the new UI (look toolbar etc) will make Blender look less like an in-house app
and more like a mature design tool on a visual side and easier to learn and use on the other side.
Many people say Blender is hard to learn but it is not Blender but 3D is hard. However the UI
did not make it enjoyable. Modo or C4D from a visual emotional user experience always went better
and I think the new UI will put Blender into the same room.
Darn what attracted me to Blender on PPC Mac Linux was the fact it looked so in-house … crap need to switch now …
I dont agree 3d is hard to learn.
I realised this the first time I used Truespace and then Zbrush.
Truespace actually had a ton of influence into the design of UI into 3d apps, it was the first to popularise the heavy reliance to icons we see nowdays dominated and being the big new thing in Blender 2.8
Unfrotunately Truespace did not manage to keep up with the competition and even though it retained a good UI till the very end it was not enough to save it.
Zbrush moved in the opposite direction , it not only kept up with the competition with the introduction of many new features it defined it but in the expense of its UI.
I have not used Zbrush for years, so when I saw some reviews naming it the worst UI for 3d app I thought they were biased and clickbait. I purchased Zbrush back in 2002 but I was lured away by Softimage which I fallen in love and still consider the best 3d app to ever exist. Of course the news broke that Autodesk acquired Softimage and my instict told me to jump ship. At the same time Blender 2.5 and at last Blender UI was bearable for me. So I switched to Blender. But I decided to take another look and I was blow away how terrible the UI was. I gave it a second try a year ago, it seemed a pity not to being entitled to free updates , at first I thought that giving a serious try and learning in more depth about the new tools would make UI more logical for me.
Alas it made it look more insane
So yeah my experience with Softimage and Truespace have tought me we can have an easy to learn 3d graphics enviroment. I was actually making an addon about and I was in a good road to realise that I need to bite the bullet and make a Blender fork.
Obviously was my last option but for the thing I want to add , Python can take me so far. So it seems I will be putting my money where my mouth is, finally and see if I can justify the years of complaining about Blender UI and GUIs in general.
Mind you my first 3d app was 3d Studio some Dos version and then Max, dont want to go back to that nightmare.
Cinema 4D and Modo have been fairly smooth rides too, Lightwave was nightmare and so was Maya although not as much as 3ds max.
In any case what is easy and what is hard is a matter of perception.
My opinion is that you cannot have a the same GUI for a beginner as for an expert and expect the beginner to find 3d easy. Plus an expert orientated GUI will be practically useless to a very large degree to a beginner.
Hard is the wrong term. I should have said:
People think Blender is hard to learn but fail to see that 3D simply is a large topic and will take time to master.
Well or you use SketchUp hahaha
SketchUp is so often mentioned to me as easier and while in fact the drafting modeling is super easy and also well functional SketchUp cannot do much at all which explains why a person does not need much brain to learn it.
But while Andrews old UI proposal got its deserved flack - one part in his proposal was dead on right.
Blender’s UI is a mix of some stuff here and some stuff there making it needlessly complex to operate.
And it seems to me Blender 2.8 finally puts an end to that chaos and combines data together into centralized spaces so you need less muscle/brain memory.
Now the 3D viewport overlay also in edit mode includes normal edge length and all that instead of showing it in the properties N panel! This all is super organized and logical lowering brain load.
I completely agree that ScetchUp is very easy to use UI but I still think that Truespace takes the cake and the refrigerator too because ScetchUp was built for beginners , Truespace was built for professional , and feature wise they are light years apart.
Blender 2.8 is definitely a big improvement but with such complex app there is always going to be light years of of room for improvement.
Everything is complex , you think 3d modeling is complex ? At least it has 2 major paths, subdivision surfaces/polygon modeling and sculpting. Audio synthesis in computer music has around 7 (additive, substractive, fm, wavetable, spectral, granular and sampling) and those are the basic one. If you want fancy ones there a ton more. That is only the sound generation. There is then sound effect, midi composition, live performance, mixing, post processing and much more. I am not including music theory in the mix, only the purely technical/technology orientated stuff.
As a matter of fact audio synthesis popularised node systems that we take from granted, back in 1996 . Reaktor and MAX/MSP being the most popular , they are so powerful that can put any node system to shame with how deep they go in terms of coding and some allow for even low level assembly code access which is kinda insane because how CPU intensive audio synthesis used to be.
Nowdays ironically they have fall from favor mainly because modern CPUs are more than enough for the most demanding audio synthesis tasks. Ironic because node systems in 3d graphics have become all the rage. Styll modern soft synths are extremely modular.
So computer music is not any less complex. But learning it is far easier mainly because music applications have always chosen simplicity over power. They give you the full GUI treatment but they always come with an “Easy mode”
“Easy mode” is an optiona GUI layer that displays only a fraction of the “advanced mode” GUI and is made not for beginners but professional that cannot afford to waste time with complex setups. If you want to go down the rabbit hole you press the “advanced mode” button and it will give you the entire GUI with all its complexity. It way more than collapsing menus by the way its really an entirely new GUI. So GUI designer cut no corners there.
Its also a diffirent mind set, musician in general loath anything that makes them wait , as live performance is pretty much all the rage, while 3d artists worry more about realism and are willing to wait hours of rendering time to get it which is why it took so long to popularise real time rendering in 3d apps even though it existed since the Age of Noha for games.
This is also the direction most likely I will go which I considered a far better GUI direction that trying to “cleanup” a complex GUI. Cleanup is extremely important too and I am glad Blender 2.8 does that, but you can go only so far with it.
I loved trueSpace…used it from 2.1 to 7.6… (AKA)'Nowherebrain"
trueSpace also had a lot of firsts(widgets, solid 3D viewport, node based sciptable logic) that everyone seems to be calling ‘standard’ today…and yet it was heavily ridiculed then…meh.