Leaderboard

You might want to consider MXI (Either optical or copper) as an alternative. It avoids another layer of drivers. Desktop PCs with Thunderbolt exist, (Mac pro, other high end workstations from Dell or HP).

Bearing in mind Antoine's comment with which I wholeheartedly agree with, I would suggest upgrading to 2020 now and plan for deliverables with SP1 or later as and when they arrive. You can have multiple versions installed side-by-side on a machine and you want time to find any upgrade issues with your current codebase and gradually migrate with fallback to your current version if things go wrong. Reasoning for 2020 is that that it supports HTTPS - which none of the previous versions do out-of-the-box and is essential nowadays. 2020 is, by now, a known entity in terms of issues and work-arounds whereas waiting for 2021 you will be at the cutting edge - where production systems never want to be unless it facilitates a show-stopping feature requirement.

I'm sure you'll get plenty of different opinion on that topic. My rule is to only use SP1 versions for customer release (not sure NI will continue using the 202X and 202X SP1 pattern though). I remember reading a blog post from John Pasquarette in which he described the bi-annual release cycle that started in 2009 but I can't spot the article again.

Yes, there is many things wrong with this. What about the new adapter icons. What is the point of moving away from the well known product logos and just use the first letter of product name instead? It makes no sense.