RALS - benefits to upgrading?

We faced a similar situation.  Our IT department repeatedly provided temporary solutions for us to access the classic version, but it because increasingly cumbersome.  After discussions with our representative and product manager, we decided to queue up for the upgrade which is free.  During transition we had a concurrent run of both the classic and new versions for about a month, allowing us time to acclimate to the upgraded interface.  While there is a slight learning curve, once you become familiar with it and create your own personalized 'views', the process is more straightforward than anticipated.  Notable, tasks like report building, overrides and editing are more user friendly (or perhaps, I simply adapted to them over time?).

We are currently upgraded to Version 7.1.4 and have not looked back.  There is a learning curve, so be sure and take advantage of all of the training webinars and RALS live sessions!  Technical support is amazing and willing to assist if you get in a pinch.  We love the updated version of RALS!  I love the personalized views and dashboard feature.  

We recently upgraded to 7.1.4.  There's not a lot of difference between the previous version (7.1), but a great deal of difference between the previous 6 versions.  I've grown to love all of the 7 versions.  But I will have to say the tech support after the upgrade was extremely bad.  The upgrade affected one of our newer sites in the fact that results would not upload to the EMR.  We had to manually upload the tests for several weeks (days, evenings, nights, weekends).  Tech support was non-existent for the most part, without a dedicated person to help us.  They used a team support approach, and none of team wanted to take the initiative to help resolve the problem.  I've noticed that since Abbott took over RALS from Alere, their tech support has really gone downhill.  If possible, I would request a dedicated person to help you resolve problems (one who has experience and knows what they are doing), not the team approach they seem to be using now (in our case anyway).

We use Roche Infinity middleware for our glucometers.  Once they have a proven system for the iSTAT, we will be changing to them.  Their tech support is wonderful.  

Brandon, I'm also going to encourage you to push for doing the upgrade. It tooks us quite a while to switch. First the nightmare was that if one of us had a refresh on a device/desktop or laptop, it was a struggle. Then trying to use EDGE as the browser proved challenging in order to log in. Finally 'somehow' we got the updated version.  
RALS will offer to get a training specialist on a virtual call although for some reason it wasn't easy to get us all scheduled for that on the RALS end. It sounded like someone who started out scheduling some of us then went out sick without a successful pass-off of us to another trainer.  
As mentioned, there is a library for playback and as mentioned, I also found the layout and actions to take pretty intuitive once I pretended I hadn't used the Silverlight/earlier versions (stopped trying to do it 'that way like before'. I like it alot. I particularly like the ease of downloading into excel sheet to be able to edit to send to site management.
Good Luck!