I’m trying to learn iPlug2 but having been on iPlug1 for many years I am struggling. iPlug2 looks completely “foreign” to me. The way it’s laid out, the functions, EVERYTHING is different. It’s almost like starting over.
iPlug1 has served many developers well for many years - could it not have been simply improved/updated? What was the driving factor behind such a major overhaul?
We took the opportunity to improve things, modernising the code, whilst making it relatively easy to port an IPlug1/wdl-ol code base and keep backwards compatiblity. It is simply untrue that EVERYTHING is different. Certain things like making plug-ins run in the browser via webassembly, removing mutexes, and adding GPU accelerated graphics necessitated major reworkings, but I believe we’ve done things in a way that doesn’t deviate too much from what an iPlug1 project looks like, keeping the plugin implementation nice and concise.
Most people don’t seem to be finding it hard to move over. I think it is pretty self evident and also well explained in the various videos and info I’ve put online what the motivations, benefits and differences of iPlug2 are. It’s really not that hard to port something over, it just requires patience.
There has not been time to make the level of documentation I would like. At some point I might do a video showing the process of upgrading the project.
It is also done GitHub - TaleTN/IPlugExample: IPlug "Tale" Edition example (tremolo effect). but I think switching to iPlug2 will get you much more support 
It is often far better, and cleaner, to make a sweeping overhaul than to try and “Band-aid” an old means.
I also started with iPlug1 and, after a bit of re-learning curve, feel that iPlug2 is indeed a significant improvement. As Oli stated in his reply, it is not difficult to migrate older projects - just takes a bit of study - but is well worth the effort. As always, start with the example projects and go from there.