To start the discussion, you must bear in mind that from 6.1 to 7.0, significant changes were made (namely in the structure of partner, address, contacts - this was decided in order to facilitate B2C situations).

See OpenERP 7.0 Release Notes for all changes

http://v6.openerp.com/node/1269#h.vzmumi9wknz2

This indeed created a drastic change and increased the cases where a migration could take more time.
I believe you will not face as many difficulties while migrating from 7.0 to 8.0 and the transition will be smoother.
I will let someone else comment on how to direct you for the migration steps to 8.0.

"maybe it is a bit part of a strategy convincing people of the pros of Enterprise contracts" or a practical way of having a fragmented ecosystem.....much like android.

I migrate from 5 to 6 and learned how non optimized openerp was....a simple example is the coutry table. The codes changed each version...why...

each app has is own database and there was much comunication with eachother. Reports where so bad that i implemented jasper. the calendar was i nightmare and we could continue with examples of nice code implementation on bad data and strategic design.

This flawed design is easly demonstrated on the demo where is frequent things not to work.

I came to a point where im looking yo Odoo (very hard to remember by the way) ver 7 and 8. After the pain of 6 i was looking for the V8,,,and there is no easy way of finding it.

Overall I think these issues inclines me more to move to a more comercial solutions as oposed to stay with Odoo. The only reason to stay is the stability of what works.

It was interesting to know the percentage of people that upgrade as oposed to the ones o leave o other systems or stay on same version

"maybe it is a bit part of a strategy convincing people of the pros of Enterprise contracts" or a practical way of having a fragmented ecosystem.....much like android.

I migrate from 5 to 6 and learned how non optimized openerp was....a simple example is the coutry table. The codes changed each version...why...

each app has is own database and there was much comunication with eachother. Reports where so bad that i implemented jasper. the calendar was i nightmare and we could continue with examples of nice code implementation on bad data and strategic design.

This flawed design is easly demonstrated on the demo where is frequent things not to work.

I came to a point where im looking yo Odoo (very hard to remember by the way) ver 7 and 8. After the pain of 6 i was looking for the V8,,,and there is no easy way of finding it.

Overall I think these issues inclines me more to move to a more comercial solutions as oposed to stay with Odoo. The only reason to stay is the stability of what works.

It was interesting to know the percentage of people that upgrade as oposed to the ones o leave o other systems or stay on same version