Thanks, I hope Autodesk thinks its excellent too. Autodesk has always been a little prickly about PDFs, but they softened recently in adding the print to PDF fuctionality in recent releases. So there is hope.

Let me take a crack at answering some of your wishes:

fade / transparency of solid hatching - nope, unless you count screening a color in your ctb file.

re-ordering of paperspace tabs - yes, (even in 2000) but very clunky pre-2008. in 2008 you just drag them to where you want and can rename on the tab. Pre-2008 you have to right click and use the move to end option, which means you have to really think about the order you do it if you have a lot of tabs.

More options in standard viewport scales - yes, you can modify your own scales in 2007 and newer

Nested layer display allowing for group freeze, off, color, etc. - maybe, visibility settings have improved drastically and combine them with the chprop filter you can pretty much capture anything, then change their visibility or properties.

To delete layers with objects. - nope, As a clunky work-around I use express tools layer merge to move those unpurgeable layers to a layer called junk. sometimes isolating the junk layer, doing a select all, delete, will allow me to purge the layer, but not always.

Easy print rendering of shading from paperspace. - don't know

Floating text (always facing view direction) - not sure

A regen button - there has been a regen command since I started ACAD in version 10 (I think it was called redraw back then), there is also a regenall command which regens all viewports at once. It would be extremely easy to program this to a custom button.

Congrats on the decision to upgrade past 2000. That is a very big jump. If you are a customization guru in 2000 you basically have to relearn how to do it in 2005 and higher. spend some time learning how to manipulate visibility states. One of the best things to learn is dynamic blocks (introduced in 2006) Those things have drastically changed how I work.

Some functionality new to 2008 (which I'm still needing to learn) are dimensions, text, and blocks that scale themselves inside the viewport to whatever scale the viewport is set to.

If you haven't joined AUGI yet, I highly recommend it. I usually get better answers there than I do from Autodesk's forums. They also have pretty good self-paced training courses put together by the members. Best of all membership is free since Autodesk decided it was in their best interest to start paying the bills back around 99 or 2000.

-Steve G.