can't believe a company would do that with their product.
Seriously ?
Ever heard of windows 8, apple os 10 (the one where they switched to intel x86 architecture), office 365, autocad 2014.
basically all companies do this - they work on the principle that if they don't completely change the software people won't buy it. the fatc that most people wouldn't choose to buy it anyway - is neither here nor there. The companies have to justify the money they pay to their programmers and the programmers have to justify their existence.

the fact that the people writing the software are quite often so out of touch with the user base that they invariably remove the best features and add in things nobody wanted, never seems to register with the companies.

In the food world - 'new and improved' means they've found a cheaper ingredient. In the computer world any time youy see 'new and improved' - you need to do your best to get hold of the 'old and infierior' product as it'll pretty much always be better and easier to use :-)

makerware 2.4 is pretty good.
I did try the 3.4 version, but just couldn't get to grips with it.