So, I don’t have a robust HA installation, currently.
I’ve been fighting with learning the config files, site maps and items flles.
Should I just skip 1.8x and start tinkering with the 2.0 release, or will I experience more things that don’t work and have limited support?
Cheers
That is a very good question. Same here. I’m playing around with some demo equipment (AVM Fritz200) but will move in May to a new house which is fully equiped with KNX stuff.
Also wondering if I should switch to the betas already or if this will cause more issues.
Currently my assumption is that I will stay on 1.8 until the main topics are working (especially that KNX connection) for me. As a beginner in openhab I’m afraid of loosing much time. Obviously I would consider everything not working as my fault first 
I’m in the same boat here. I’m desperate to get off of my [zwave] Vera Edge as I outgrew its capabilities about ten minutes after buying it. (Heap big buyer’s remorse with that one!)
I’ve decided to go with 1.8/1.9 for now; my understanding is that openhab2 will provide an upgrade path for openhab1 configs, so that’s good enough for me. I tend not to like being on the bleeding edge but instead wait until other folks have jumped up and down on new code for a while. So even though it looks like openhab2 isn’t all that far away I likely wouldn’t upgrade anytime soon anyhow.
I’ve started also from scratch - but took the chance with oh2 and habmin… So far I’m happy 
Thanks all. I’m going to tinker with 2.0 as well but consider 1.8 my ‘production’ environment - hoping that what I learn in 1.8 applies to 2.0.