I am a professional, as I have been for longer than most of the readers of these forums have been alive, and I use Windows 8.1, as I used all of the latest MS O/Ses always back to the earliest days of DOS (and I was a Unix guy before that and kept it up-to-date on the mainframes under my administration, and of Multics before that, ditto).
I feel that it is foolish to hang onto an obsolete operating system any longer than you must. I recognize that sometimes you must if your computer is too puny and weak to handle the new O/S, or you are dependent on proprietary software that its developers have not updated, or are in an environment where you are constrained to stick with older peripherals for which device drivers under the new O/S are not available. But you are always, every single time, going to reap benefits from going with the up-to-date versions unless you are actually prevented from doing so.
But if the reason for your resistance is personal unfamiliarity with the changes in the new O/S, or you are reluctant merely in response to online bashing of the new O/S by people who inaccurately consider themselves gurus under the older version (as was rampant with both Windows Vista and Windows 8 and with XP before them by fanboys of Windows 98), then this is counterproductive foolishness.
There is always a learning curve with new software. It is generally very brief with new Windows O/Ses, brief even with changes as radical as those between Windows 7 and 8. But newer is always more stable and more secure, and is usually more efficient and logical despite the complaints of those who find their previous expertise no longer as impressive to others as it had been. And the sooner you get over that learning curve, the better off you will be, because progress happens whether you whine about it or not.
Windows 8 is a huge improvement over Windows 7, and 8.1 is an improvement on that. I am pretty sure that 10 will be another improvement, as will all future releases with only occasional and rapidly corrected exceptions.
In computers, newer is better. It's that simple.