I am not 100% sure what your question ist… but I try it.
openHABian 1.5 is the latest release.
Yes openHAB changed A LOT in the last 2-3 years. Biggest step was from OH 1.X to OH 2.X (in my eyes).
My experience - My opinion
I stopped using openHABian, I stopped installing openHAB, Grafana, InfluxDB, node-RED and Mosquitto via apt.
I am running openHAB, InfluxDB, Grafana, node-RED and Mosquitto via Docker.
Don’t start the basket weaving yet, maybe automate it with openHAB 
I also use a lot of ESP8266 (Sonoff mostly) and ESP32 Custom with MQTT.
The MQTT-Binding can be configured completely via PaperUI.
But I am not sure what you are asking for…
If you wanna read about my openHAB Setup, see below 