Sorry but I just cannot resist chimming in on this...

As others have said your post is not clear.

As far as I can tell modeling in 8.5 and 2008 in ALL views is EXACTLY the same. You can model in the perspective view. Space bar brings up the hot menus, and you can switch views. It all behaves exactly the same as it used to except now there is a cube in place of a compass(axis doodad). So I am not sure what you are having trouble with.

I would not go so far as to say there are "lots" of new features in 2008, and anyone that thinks that has clearly drank the Autodesk coolaid (Jonestown referance).

The most irritating thing I find about this new policy of suffle the menu's adding a couple trivial fixes here and there and calling it a new release every 6 months to a year is that it really plays havoc with all my scripts and menus and preferences and hotkeys and MOST importantly my plugins.

It is not a simple matter of just copying your maya 8.5 prefs into maya 2008 because some of the plugins have to be installed with an installer and they pepper the preferences folder with lots of stuff so trying to copy all your 8.5 stuff over can introduce instabilities. So then I find myself manually recreating all my preferences, scripts, shelfs, etc. I don't know about others but once I get all that stuff tuned I pretty much forget how to set it up again by the time the next release comes out so its a really bloody nightmare getting the user environment back to the way I like it. Then a couple months go by and they play musical chairs with the menus again call it a new release and cause me to spend 6 months of fiddling with my plugins and prefernces again. That is what is annoying me!

I am all for improving Maya but breaking my plugins every 6 months to replace a compass with a cube quite frankly frosts my nads!