I'm missing out on being able to make use of functionality that's pretty standard and simple these days.

+1 for this; it's a very key point. Sticking with the fixed pipeline will just put brick walls in front of you and horribly restrain you any time you want to do anything beyond the pre-canned blending modes. D3D8 does have shaders, but they're woefully primitive and not being able to rely on basic stuff like e.g. dependent texture reads is really constraining. It is possible to hack something together with some creative use of the bumpenvmap stuff, but that's also horrible to use and quite restrictive.

The best way to view 8 is as a short-lived interim version between 7 and 9 (just like the early shading models were interim between fixed pipeline and SM2/3), but if you're starting out new you no doubt have ambitions and ideas for cool things you'd like to do, and 8 is just going to depress and disappoint you in that regard.

That doesn't make it bad - it was awesome in it's time and especially compared to what went before, but it was of it's time and that time is long passed.

The only reason I continue to use it is due to the limitations of my development machine.

Jesus christ, how old is your development machine. My laptop is 4 years old with an incredibly crummy (and old at the time) intel integrated GPU and still happily chugs along with directx 9 (bar generally low framerate) and Dx10 in software drawing mode. 11 it doesn't like.

[quote name='kseh' timestamp='1351100979' post='4993482']
The only reason I continue to use it is due to the limitations of my development machine.

Jesus christ, how old is your development machine. My laptop is 4 years old with an incredibly crummy (and old at the time) intel integrated GPU and still happily chugs along with directx 9 (bar generally low framerate) and Dx10 in software drawing mode. 11 it doesn't like.
[/quote]

I used 9 on a late 2005/early 2006 vintage laptop once; did a lot of development on it and generally had a good(ish) time. It had Intel 915 graphics, SM2 capability (but with the VS stage emulated in software - no big deal for that particular machine) and I was quite impressed by how capable the machine actually was given it's specs and age (I eventually ended up giving it to a friend for her college work and it finally died earlier this year; quite a good innings and huge value for money).

For the kind of more limited program you'd write on that class of machine, and which you would be restricted to with 8 or below anyway, 9 is perfectly viable.

Here's the thing.

D3D9 is capable of running on, and will work perfectly well with, more downlevel hardware. Just detect the caps at startup and don't do anything that's not supported, and it will work.