I'd say that OSX 10.0 came out as beta and they have been restoring features that were in Classic and fixing bugs. That is principally why we have had 3 paid upgrades. That and fiddling with the GUI, mostly for reasons other than efficiency, although I give a thumbs up to the side bar in Tiger (copied from Windows btw)

Edit - OK, this seems as good a point as any to re-open it; please try to keep it on topic. New threads may be started by pressing the 'New Thread' button.

Thank you.

Back on topic then, my PowerBook came with Jaguar and I haven't moved over to Panther, partly due to finances, partly because I think Jaguar sounds cooler than Panther, but mostly because I didn't really see the main advertised feature set as must have items. There are some small advancements that I would appreciate, but I think now that Tiger is on the horizon, I'll be waiting until then. Apart from anything else, I expect that security updates for Jaguar will stop when Tiger is released. And Tiger sounds cooler than Jaguar.

I've got 10.2 on an old iMac (400MHz/320MB/10GB) and 10.3 on my new PowerBook G4 17". The PowerBook is my primary computer while the iMac is mostly for goofing off and miscellaneous tasks.

I definitely like 10.3 better. I can't point to any major things, but I think Finder is much more usable if you spend a lot of time using it, particularly when it comes to networking. I'd have a hard time coming up with $130 worth of improvements, but I do like it better.

Let's assume that you will be using Panther for 1 year before upgrading to Tiger.
If you use your Mac for work and you save a minute a day by using Panther instead of Jaguar, it would pay for itself if your billing rate is $20/hr or more. Enhanced pleasure ("I do like it better") is a bonus.