RE: Aurora

That's the price of progress, I guess!

My opinion is that retaining all the old deleted lines of code and mod
marks in S21 (up to SP5) was also highly confusing, and in many ways it
made retrofitting and mods more difficult rather than easier.  Some
programs had hundreds of lines of deleted code and you could find, for
example, that new lines of code had been added then deleted, making it
quite difficult to identify where your changes should go.  

The conversion from 'old' RPG to ILE was always going to create issues
for customers with extensive modifications, but I don't think Geac has
made it any harder by cleaning up the source code.  What you would need
to do is create a "clean" version of your mods in ILE and then compare
that with the standard Aurora source code.  My guess is that this will
be easier (once your programmers are familiar with ILE) because the
programs will be smaller.

You can't avoid the effort of testing your modifications, but I would
totally agree with Richard that when you upgrade you should look
seriously at eliminating some of your modifications altogether.  You'll
probably find that some of them are no longer required (or at least not
essential) and that others can be replaced with standard functionality.
Many mods that seemed like a good idea at the time don't really look so
clever when you analyze them again with a critical eye.

One other area to consider is workflow (@ctive Modeler,
process.connect..) because that has the potential to greatly simplify
some modifications (e.g. rather than modifying order entry, you have a
trigger based on some business rules that will run in the background). 

Aurora may still not be for you, but don't dismiss it too quickly.