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Honest opinion? It's going to cost the standard program more to upgrade now than to slowly rebuild for v4.
1) The revised admin is confusing.
For the affiliate, the defaults are quite nice, but to the standard affiliate manager who don't understand a table join is, they can easily get confused, and leave things half-configured, or end up making 40 redundancies anywhere when 'forgetting to click the little pink arrows' for the next stage of the configuration. The flow resembles an M.C. Escher painting for most people - and it still trips me up sometimes.
2) Virtually all third party tools will have to be completely rewritten
The members data is now two tables wide where you can match on member id to get the same info, which is pretty trivial, but trying to directly look up transactions to match to a biller id without manually seeing what's setup in the biller admin is a chore since it references the local index rather than the given account number, and this data is still encrypted as it is in NATS v3, but now you still get to have another external lookup table.
3) Biller support.
About a third of the billler merchants are implemented, as compared to V3. Including former (dead) billers, there are 75 in NATS v3.1.58.1; there are 23 total available in NATS 4.0.44.1.
4) Skins/Mailers/etc are not easily replicated and replaced.
You can't just take an old skin and slap it on V4; many, many variables have changed; $available_data. is now $mdata. for join forms, as an example, and many of the globals have been entirely re-implemented.
Here's how a mailer used to work for a default link code:
{$nats_code[1][1]}
Here's what you need to do, now for the same thing:
{nats_list_linkcodes userid=$toid program=1 site=1 tour=1 data_only=1 code_only=1}{$linkcodes.1.1.1.0.0.0}
Eventually everyone will move to V4, but many will not until they have no choice.
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