In some aspects, upgrading to 2.3 from 2.2.17 was a real PITA as they did change many aspects of the FA offerings, especially due to the variable theme style.
The sad thing is, for me, the XenForo script itself has not brought forth any major improvements that made me want to upgrade. As I mentioned, the ONLY reason I upgraded was due to the requirements of the 3rd party add-on advancements that I was interested in. If you are waiting on major end user improvements from the XenForo developers... hell may freeze over first. The continue to be primarily reliant on their 3rd party developers to take up the slack where they fall flat on their faces.
It's a very sad state of affairs when the core script itself fails to offer their license holders any major end user advancements/improvements that are "have to have" and fail to push the admin to upgrade. But it has become a common everyday aspect of XenForo. For all the "talk" that they have given, they have still failed to walk the talk that they have posted. I have lost faith in the original "feel" of XF, and much of that is because of current actions from the XF developers. It's lost that feeling of concern/interest of license holders needs that it had even 5 years ago. I'll continue to use it for now as it meets my needs (primarily because of 3rd party add-ons and not because of any major advancements XF has made) but if I find anything better in the future, I won't hesitate to kick it to the curb of forgotten history. And yes, much of that is due to the recent (over the last several years) of the regression of the developers concerns for the needs of the license holders.
Generally from what I have observed personally, it is not the XF developers that push the upgrades, but the 3rd party developers making improvements that license holders want but are dependent upon the recent XF versions.
