thanks for the insights, and maybe i should have it made it more clear that i'm using CI 3, but hopefully your pep talk will motivate people on the fence.
yes there are developers working on their own projects and in complete control. but the reality for developers working for a business or non profit -- the developer has to first convince management to upgrade. and upgrading will involve other applications, platforms, etc that are also critical for the business process.
the step of what it takes to convince management to upgrade is often overlooked. for those of you lucky enough not to be in these trenches you might assume it takes one quick meeting where everyone agrees to an obvious conclusion that upgrading is good -- and the developer is immediately given ample time to refactor all the code with no distractions.
the actual reality is it will involve many meetings, budgets, projections, schedules -- while at the same time dealing with all the other business concerns -- BEFORE the upgrade is even on the schedule. and then the upgrade will get rescheduled. and rescheduled. meanwhile the managers you are working with were never clear why the upgrade was so important -- so every meeting you have to explain all over again why it should be on the schedule at all. developers are asking for a clear list of the differences/benefits of codeigniter 2 vs 3 -- not for themselves but because they need something that management can understand and will be compelling enough to convince them to budget for it.
for many developers they will end up working on the upgrade partly on their own time just to get it done. so yes getting ci 2 system updates while all this is all going on is a huge deal for those developers. they aren't going to post and say thanks on this bulletin board but i know they are very appreciative.
