I am an individual user of Delphi, starting back in the early Turbo Pascal days. I have quite a bit of code developed over the years, but I have never sold software commercially or used it for business. Historically, Borland supported the non-professional users with lower cost versions, but Embarcadero does not. As I consider upgrading to Delphi 2010, I am put off by the high price. Embarcadero is also trying to "encourage" upgrading by threatening to charge "new user" prices for upgrades after Dec 31st.

I have several questions for the community to help me decide whether to upgrade.

1) I have read about difficulties updating existing code to support the unicode string types. I have no need for unicode strings, and I am happy with the string support in D7. Will I have to modify existing code and components just to re-compile under D2010? Or are there compiler options to allow backward compatibility if new string types are not required?

2) The main reason I'm considering upgrading is for IDE improvements, and to get access to new APIs added to Windows since 2002. Are there any Windows 7 APIs or capabilities that would be impossible to support from my programs compiled using using Delphi 7 (assuming appropriate JEDI API libraries, for example)?

3) Is there anything else about Delphi 2010 that is really compelling for someone who is primarily interested in Win32 apps, and not working with databases? I have read that D2010 is slow to load, and other versions between D7 and D2010 have had stability issues, and the help system was "broken". What is the biggest benefit to D2010?