Despite my apprehensions about it, upgrading to WordPress 2.0 was relatively easy. I went through the precaution of creating a test blog, only to find that the ViewLevel plugin worked fine.
For some strange reason, WordPress would not let me upgrade until I disabled Brian's Threaded Comments. Once that was accomplished, I only had to patch wp-db.php again to get Unicode characters to display properly and edit my .htaccess to remove the changes that WordPress had made, which prevented me from accessing my RSS aggregator.
What do I think? The administration section looks a lot nicer. Even though I have disabled the rich text editor, writing posts is still a joy with the new preview (which actually uses your site's themes and plugins now). I am trying Akismet. I am still thinking about changing themes, but I have not run across anything I like yet.