The reason I do not upgrade - can you help?

[bgoodman4]

I am hoping someone can help me solve the following problem which is preventing me from upgrading.

I have customized my visualization settings (that is the particles, flow fields etc) that can play when the visualization program is running. There are some that I just do not like so I have deselected them. This was a fairly labour intensive job as there are a great many of these effects. I was wondering if there was any way to merge(?) my settings with any new effects that might be available in an upgrade? That is, if I have deselected effect A, is there any way to automatically have A deselected in the upgrade. I had written to SS support a few years back about this issue and was told that I could export/save my customized settings and import them into the upgrade but this means I would still be limited to the effects I had in the old version. If this is going to be the case I don't see why I should bother upgrading. There would be nothing new for me to see unless I again went through all of the effects and manually reset them. I have done this for an upgrade once and the idea of again recording all of the deselected effects, finding them in the new version, and de-selecting them again, is very unappealing.