derp… shoulda looked up. 
I tried. It just goes pitch black.
And it can’t be right that something so simple requires nodes or other intricate trickery. That is just bad design. I must be overlooking something, or I might as well be coding graphics in Python or something…
The usual use case is that the scene lighting affects the objects within the world. You are in a sense looking for a special case where the background does not affect the scene. That’s why you need a special node setup, or you may try to use compositing.
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No. It is a perfectly normal use/need that was a perfectly normal feature until now. It was removed in favor of new and fancy options. Plenty of people have used that function in th epast, it is not some niche thing. It just isn’t the advanced feature, but that should not count against it, or any other feature. Things are being removed for not being advanced or flashy enough, to cater to modern interest over…
Oh crap. I just realized something. Blender is being gentrified…
(edit: If my language seems a bit weird, I just came from the old man yells at cloud thread… sorry…)
If simple stuff now requires this level of nodewrangling to do, I am DEFINITELY switching back to 2.79…
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As mentioned in the other thread, this is very often not correct. The normal use case was very often that people had to fake the impact of the environment lighting, which usually took them very long. It was ridiculously tedious. Now, that’s not anymore the case.
Now you are looking for something else, that was more common in the old days. Guess what, you can still do it. It is still possible, in fact, you can do way more things than you could in the old days. In the old days, you couldn’t do them because there were literally hardware limitations everywhere to prevent them. Now they don’t exist anymore for many techniques.
If you don’t want that, you literally have to stick to 2.79.
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Give me one good reason why both options cannot exist? I am not saying remove one option, I am saying still keep the other.
No, that is the problem. If I could just click on an option to use Only Background or something, everything would be fine. Doing things differently is not a problem. Making them impossible to do without trickery is the problem. Nobody can describe a way to do it that does not involve figuring out the precisely right assembly of nodes, and that is just insane. That would be like having to be a junior mechanic just to drive a new car. But I am sensing that “simple” has fallen out of style, which is a very bad turn for Blender to take, in my opinion.
If there is a way to do it that is as simple, or nearly as simple, as just clicking a button (as it used to be), I will take my words back. Well, some of them anyway.
Are we seriously at the “don’t like it, go back home” stage of development? I feel this is a bad direction to take Blender in, but hey, what do I know. Guess I can just go sit with the smelly kid in the bleachers 
I think my explanation was thorough enough to explain the situation and why things actually make sense.
And of course, if you are not able to adapt to that reality, there is literally no way around, other than sticking to 2.79 which is still an option.
The reality is, yes there is new stuff. If you want specific behaviour, you may have to learn that new stuff. If you are not willing to do so, your options are very limited, but 2.79 is definitely one of them.
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If you’re not terribly attached to using Eevee, it looks like you can do basically what you want in Cycles by unchecking a couple tick boxes under Ray Visibility in the World Properties.
I didn’t do any extensive testing, so I don’t know what issues that might cause in a more complex scenario than my single object test here.
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Thanks, that works! Sadly, it 10x my rendering time, so is not usable at this stage. But if I need a workaround at higher quality, it is an option. It is just insane that making the render SIMPLER is apparently not possible in Eevee. Then again, she is a young render engine, and has to come with her issues, I guess…
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That is one of the big downsides of cycles. 
Maybe, but you did not explain why both options (background affecting and not affecting foreground) cannot be easily available.
This is not about “adapting to that reality”, this is about Blender removing usable features in favor of, well, nothing, for no real reason. Again, give one sensible reason why there is no longer the simple “background is just background” option, because nobody has given any other reason than “if you don’t like it, get lost”, and it is starting to become a serious cause of worry.
Again, why do people insist that I refuse to learn?! I clearly state that I was giddy as a schoolgirl to get into Geonodes, and that I accepted that some things need to be done in new ways! I just disagree with scrapping useful, simple, functional features in favor of fancy stuff that either does not work (by its own admission) or needs overcomplicated workarounds to do simple things. I am not refusing to learn, I am just refusing to learn meaningless workarounds to things that used to be good solid features. Everybody else, however, seems to refuse to learn from the past, which is one of the things that worry me.
It does come at a cost, yes, and I have not yet done work that justifies it. I never got that find of it, but I see the (theoretical) point. I was just hoping that Eevee would bridge quality features with speed and simplicity. Now it seems that is not the case. And I worry
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You can always render with alpha and comp a background color later. But really @DNorman 's solution earlier in the post is how you should do it
The background is essentially an emissive shader and it is tightly integrated with everything else. Another option is to have something as background and another thing as for lighting. Why is that not an option? Just because something was at one point the default does not mean there now has to be an option for that.
And, yes, you have the option. Use the simple shader setup to get exactly what you want. You can even use it to get a lot of other variations, that could literally not be expressed in the UI as simple options.
And as pointed out in the other thread, there is an even simpler way than using a shader.
As a matter of fact, you have many options to get what you are looking for. Another one would be to use the compositor.
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Makes sense. No point to rendering in 10s what can be done in 1s if you don’t have to. 
I only just discovered the “persistent data” option and shudder to think how much time I wasted rendering by not using it before.
Ironically, I switched to cycles as my main renderer because overlapping glass objects in Eevee were giving me issues, and Cycles was just simpler (In that case).
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I understand your frustration. With your backgrounds not lighting the scene, there’s (afaik) two ways of doing it… the nodewrangling pictured above (by DNorman and myself), or keeping the background black, and put a plane behind the scene with your color of choice.
and then, save that as your template/default scene, so you only have to go through that one time.
as for why, none of us are on the blender team that made that decision, and really can’t answer you there.
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Honestly, I think it was not a design decision. It was just such a simple little thing that nobody noticed it dying in the back of some dark room when everything around it changed. Ther eis also a compositor solution, but I think my frustrations have grown beyond this little annoyance. I am worried, especially after a few of the responses in this and the old man yells at cloud thread that Blender is heading down the Twitter/X route, doing things more for flash and excitement than for good, solid utility. It is everywhere else these days, and I noticed it lurking in the Blender shadows for several years now. I think my frustration is in seeing things go down a route I have no desire to follow…
(i should add Kologne’s solution in the other thread too, so 3 ways)
and if you choose not to stick with 3.x, well, that’s a valid choice too, of course. many have done so, each with their own reasons for doing so. nothing wrong with that. thankfully, the older versions still work on current hardware, and I suspect they will for quite some time still unless there’s some magical new hardware paradigm pop up.
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Luckily, the developers respect Blender and its users and keep old versions available and in working condition. I love that about Blender, it would never fly with big commercial software!
What bothers me is how much 3.X is starting to look like a branch, not a continuation, of the program. To many either / or cases, too few this and more cases. And I worry that it us a shift in mentality. But there is no way to know that before it is too late…
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