Can't Upgrade Project when New Engine Version Released

Thanks for chiming in, really appreciate it.

This is pretty sad news, as it makes it kind of impractical to use ShooterGame.

I work in the AAA games industry, and I’ve spent the past 4 weeks modifying the PlayerPawn BP after work and on weekends. I am committed to using UE4 to create my indie game.
I’m worried that I’ll make/edit Blueprints, and when a new version drops, it will be extremely difficult (in a worst case, not possible?) to move over all of my work.
Here’s a screen of the PlayerPawn after 4 weeks in my free time:

That’s the event graph, I have a ton of custom functions, and I’ve also added my own animations, so I have edited AnimMontages, AnimBlueprints, etc.
I plan on working on this game for the next 1.5+ years in my free time. I don’t want to get invested in it so far, and a year into development hit a wall because of an updating issue.
When I updated from 4.2 to 4.3, my project wouldn’t compile anymore. I had about 5-10% of the work you saw, so I scrapped my 4.2 ShooterGame, installed the new 4.3 version, and copy/pasted/recreated the work in 4.3.
I figured it was a hack solution (not left with any options), but now I’m thinking- “what happens when I have 25% of my entire game complete? 50%? 75%?”.
Copying/pasting/redoing work makes no sense to me; this would never be an option at a game studio.

Seems there are only two solutions here:

  1. upgrade, grab the latest Shooter Game, copy/paste/recreate tons of work over and over again, everytime a new engine version drops
  2. stick with one stable engine version for the complete duration of development, and never upgrade (defeats purpose of subscription model Epic has adopted)

What are your thoughts ? Any advice?
I love UE4, and personally think it’s the best engine ever produced.
I look forward to seeing you guys make some progress towards alleviating the pain of upgrading engine versions!