Was very similar for me. No good reason to go V2, the new query language, on top of sucking for anyone that only uses it once every few weeks, also wasn't really supported well in Grafana.

I ended up trying VictoriaMetrics by near accident as infuxdb didn't like something on my raspberry pi, and honestly it has been pretty painless. It is Prometheus-like stack which means you can use any PromQL-compatible things with it. There is "all in one binary", and version split by functions.

VM have tools to migrate from InfluxDB v1. I ended up just sticking old influxdb data in one database, as I wanted to change the format of what I write to it along with the migration.

> Ultimately, I still stuck with InfluxDB v1 because sending data to it via the InfluxDB line protocol is so simple. I have a couple of bash scripts that use awk to transform command output to Influx line protocol and send it to InfluxDB. It's just so simple. I love it.

It also have agent that's job is to convert from various protocols, and do the scraping, that includes influxdb, and few other popular protocols.