Migration and migraines need help

Kevin As you can see my menu customizations is vast. The dropdowns you see are setting level, symbology, etc. And this case setting a multline style and invoking the mline command. Others may set the level and Smartline command and  Tell me how to customize Ce to get this fast production, please. Templates could work if they allowed you to assign a command too, but it doesn't

I've had some success having the old top bar menus show up in CONNECT in my Quick Access Toolbar just by referencing the older dgnlib file in my CONNECT configuration.

If that doesn't work you can add standard Toolboxes (both default and custom) to the Quick Access Toolbar and they will mimic the older bar menu.

I'm more a workspace person than a ui customization expert, If you want to try and duplicate that with a ribbon setup I would create your own Workflow and populate it with panels and buttons and drop-down menus. A Workflow consists of the Ribbon Tabs and Groupings with in the ribbon tab and then commands in the group.

So if you open Customize Ribbon, click the New Workflow button in the right-panel, I called this My Buttons. This created an entry in the drop-down under the workflow in the title bar. Then I created a Home tab under that and just copied the Home tab options from another workflow. Then I created another tab to duplicate one of your menu options 1CW. Under that I created a panel U-Below and just kept creating panels (these sub-panels don't appear in my ribbon, but they make it useful to group items.)

Then finally I created buttons. You can assign key-ins to buttons.

Another option would be to make the 1/2 Ply panel a Drop-Down menu with 1/2 PLY BELOW and 1/2 PLY MASK as options underneath it. That would tighten up how many buttons you had appearing in the ribbon.

Note that this ribbon setup is quite a few clicks less than your old setup. Assuming you already have your Workflow selected it's 1 click to select a ribbon tab, and a 2nd to select the tool. Your screenshot is 5 clicks each time you want to change a tool.

I'm doing pretty much the same as you. I've set up one workspace and one workset for each client. My settings files are on the c drive, dgns on the d drive, one set of folders for each. The other issue, the gui, I can only recommend you adjust to the "new way". I've had to do this 6 or 7 times over the years. I recommend the Task Navigation ribbon with a few custom add ons for commands that aren't there. There is a button upper right that will hide the thing (it sort of works).

I agree with everything Lorys says, but I have taken the opposite approach, anticipating Bentley will eventually force us all onto Connect. It's buggy as a week old slice of fruit, but somehow I manage to get my work done. You will be able to migrate much of the ui from v8i, but I would resist the temptation to try and make it look exactly like v8i.

if it is a common tool that is delivered such as place smartline. The why not simply create templates ? 

load the needed template for the symbology then pick the needed tool (place smartline).