No offense, but the learning curve is not that steep. There are changes, but nothing like switching to a brand new daw. I think you will be using it productively fairly quick. Recommend watching a few videos from all of the X series. 

X3 comes with loads of plug-ins that will help your music sound great...recommended.
Very good bang for the buck.

djwayne
X3 comes with loads of plug-ins that will help your music sound great...recommended.
Very good bang for the buck.

+1 The plugins alone are worth the upgrade.
You can run both 8.5 and X-3 along side each other so you can learn X-3 at your own pace. Once you start playin with X-3 you wont mess with 8.5 anymore.

I upgraded to X2 because I was impressed by the screensets feature, which makes it possible to recall different window configurations with a single click.  Unfortunately X2 also has lots of annoying bugs, mostly resulting in inconsistent behaviour in Track View.  Hopefully this does not apply to X3.

I didn't find the learning curve to be too bad.  There were definite changes to workflow but it didn't take but a couple hours and I was able to accomplish a great deal.

Sanderxpander
X3 finally feels like it's better than 8.5, to me, whereas X1 and X2 were just different and sometimes annoyingly so.

+10

I used 8.5 for years and did a lot of successful productions too... I also have a production break right now and the time to get used and experiment with X3. It is now a week, about 10-20 hours working with it, importing old projects, create new ones... I still miss a lot of features, but I think the overall quality of my output has increased especially because of the PC. The learning curve depends much on your workflow, for me the biggest change is the urge to use the inspector. The skylight mixing view is still horrible for me, it takes ages to find a track, no contrasts, only 2 big send buttons (not 4 small ones!).

musichoo
I followed the grade patch from 8.5 to X3. X3 is definitely light years more advance than 8.5. Get the Groove3 video or Karl Ross X2 video(9hours) to get you started. Go for it!

Do you have a link to the Karl Ross videos? Google finds a lot of Karl Rosses, but none seem to be associated with Sonar. Even adding the word "Sonar" to the search turned up nothing relevant.

Google "Duckbar". Created by one of our forum users names Panup. He's a master producer and programer. His program hooks into Sonar and adds some of that old 8.5 flavor and much more including a wider use of color and toolbars.

Its free though donations accepted. Its an excellent program and is regularly updated with user feature requests. Its not endorsed by Cakewalk but neither is it banned by them. They do however ask that you undo any changes made if you need Cakewalk tech support. Any changes you make to Sonar can be just as easily undone.

Panup is always quick to provide updates as Cakewalk makes version changes.

Karl Rose aka FastBikerBoy FBB