I started using it today to create something fairly complicated and the improvements are massive!
Editing multiple meshes at the same time selecting all and merge by distance or limited dissolve etc, rather than doing it mesh by mesh!! The weight paint mode seems improved with much more brush options. Using collections for everything allows me to hide crap that i dont want at the moment and makes it a breeze for adding things like particles based on those collections, and is also great for selecting all those objects at once from the outliner! just so much more organized.
Adding things to quick favorites is amazing eg i had to adjust the origin point of a bunch of objects by 3D cursor location, so i added it to the quick favs, and now the 3D cursor sticks to the geometry you want, so it was super fast!
The overlays buttons are great, for turning them all off when preview rendering or turning on wireframe whilst in eevee mode. its faster more powerful working in eevee. The little boxes that open up when you apply a tool make it so stress free once you get used to them. And im sure theres many more improvements others have noticed beyond what i have.
Weight Paint mode sucks, you can’t create hotkeys for brushes, painting is slower than in 2.79, brush additions in weight paint is in latest build 2.79.7, if you toggle x-ray in edit mode and then switch to weight paint mode it stays ON it affects bones display and they hard to select, always need to disable x-ray after edit mode.
I feel you, weight paint should be getting as much attention as the edit mode/undo performance.
We can add hair grooming with visible children to the list, nice and smooth in 2.79, no-go in 2.80.
That being said, from someone coming from using Maya for 15 years in production, 2.80 is a joy to use for any newcomer while 2.79 is more… a challenge:) . There’s a reason the user base is expanding, I tried Blender every year for ages, the transition curve was just too steep for people working 10 hours a day. Managed to learn zbrush, houdini, mari and whatnot, failed with blender so many times… I’m glad that changed.
lol we poor folk have had no choice but to learn Blender all these years. I never imagined zbursh or houdini could be less a learning curve than the older versions of Blender. Still i could never afford such software. The only other over 3D software i’ve ever used is 3DS MAX, and i must admit it had a very intuitive UI going back a long time. Even going back 20 years when it had the quad view thing as standard, i still have to laugh sometimes in Blender when im trying to move an object in one 3D viewport and it moves to an unexpected position, then you rotate and move it again, and it’s still wrong, repeat ad infinitum.
Ok, i see, that sounds like a headache. You are a much more in depth user of weight paint than me. Hopefully you can report this in the developer forums and such where it will get noticed and worked on. They wont know about it if you just complain in an obscure thread like this.
Absolutely, I failed so many times with blender 
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Well, houdini has an apprentice version, and back in the day I bought zbrush for a couple hundred bucks from my first salary, free upgrades ever since. Nowadays there are schools teaching cg so beginners don’t need to buy all those things.
But ye, blender always had a very unique way of it’s own, felt very much like something made for left handed people. Most times it’s just simple things throwing people off though, snapping 3d cursor in edit mode and alt-ctrl-shift-c in object mode to change a pivot for example made me laugh countless times 
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