I am glad I learned on 2.4X. I had the Essential Blender book and found out that I did not know anything about 3D. Back in about 98 I had Ray Dream 3D. I think that is what it was. 
It was a pain to me. Pre 2.4 Blender looked like a bad hang over. If it was not for Roland Hess and 2.4X, I may not be here right now. Thanks Roland. I guess that is why 2.4X is important to me.
So how can I make 2.7X interface more friendly?
I guess I am great at killing threads. 
While I see no trouble with using 2.49, itâs like learning the software twice which I wouldnât recommend. Practically everybody would switch eventually or abandond ship.
Iâve been teaching Blender since 2005 and if your students donât get it, youâre not doing your job properly. Blender was always easy if someone skilled introduced you to it.
Thanks for the reply.
If you do teach them how to use blender they will just have to go home and download 2.76 before they can do any real work with it lol
Thanks for the reply.
I heard in a certain forum that Blender has a terrible interface.
Does it have a bad interface?
I found that once learned, it seems to be easier to use.
2.76.
No questions,
The differences are way too apparent, all that time you will spend teaching 2.48 will be wasted time.
because in the end of the day, no body is going to use 2.49 in a real production workflow.
They will have to move to 2.5+ eventually, when they do theyâll get confused again.
@Cinema,
Itâs like a brick wall you see,
itâs hard to get in at first because when you open it youâll ask questions, a lot of questions,
Like,
Why canât I select things?!
Why isnât right click doing anything?
Why on earth is this render so noisy,
Oh god I quit Iâm just going to go back Cinema 4D.
but once you chill and watch Andrew prices tutorials and listen to his podcasts, it gets you motivated.
Thatâs where you break the wall,
Once you break the wall, you can stomp on the bricks individually, walk over them, you own the wall now 
it took me forever to transition from the old versions, and I know many people had the same experience. I would not recommend learning on old versions, because itâs like a whole different program.
Agreed, only I would add that it would be like a different (and far less powerful) program.
2.49âs feature set pales in comparison to 2.7x (no GI, no physically-based render engine, no Ngons, ectâŚ). You will also find that thereâs nothing these days on the Blender Foundationâs website that is relevant to 2.4x either.
Definitely teach on current versions: leave the 2.4x interface âforever, thankfully, behind.â
The Blender team pulled off an astonishing(!) user-interface makeover that paved the way for Blender to become a truly professional-grade 3D application. IMHO, only the current version of the product should be taught, and you should be prepared to update your curricula as often as necessary, because âchange happens fast.â
How does Blender compare to X or Y?
What can I say to a student learning Blender when they ask me about the other 3D software?
I guess Google is a possible source for an answer.
to the first one,
Holds up.
Has itâs pros and cons.
I could go on all day but the rules forbid it soâŚ
There are âbest ofâ web sites, eg: slant.co so feel free to ask âWhats the best âŚ?â type questions there.
But such comparisons are only as good asâŚ
- The experience level of the people commenting/voting.
- How closely their use-case matches yours.
Results from searching online are much the same when it comes to general discussion and forum posts.
It typically ends up just showing whats most popular among people with the spare time to up-vote their favorite tools, and may have a bias from fans who arenât serious users.
While you could do worse then picking the most popular tools in any field,
take these kinds of recommendations with a grain of salt.
Each application has its strong points, and if students like to try different ones - they can download the demo versions at home.
Best not to get too much into these discussions unless you have some personal experience and they ask about specifics you can help them with.
Further this is one of those never ending debates ~ Linux vs Windows, PS4 vs XBOX, Beatles vs Rolling Stones ⌠etc⌠
Beatles were best thoâŚ
I say they can go ahead and try Blender if they want, itâs not like theyâre taking a big financial risk or anything (Blender is free and the only thing theyâll need to have is some spare time).
Coming from a mainly Lightwave background, which I used from V4 through to V9.6, I can say Blender more than holds itâs own against Lightwave and in some areas has features I sorely missed when using LW. I donât mean things like the video editor etc either, just purely modelling functions. Blender 2.7 is so far ahead of 2.49 in terms of ease of use, I never could adapt to using 2.49 even though I tried a few times, 2.7 feels more like other 3D packages to me.
I use 2.75 as well simply because the LWO importer for the latest build is hosed, which I need to access my old Lightwave models.
Has this been reported to the bug tracker?