Upgrading Drupal

I am trying to upgrade a 6.2.2 site to 7.8 for the third or fourth time in the last few months here. I've been attempting it over and over for close to 4 hours tonight so far.
I keep trying different things, it fails, I restore and try another method, again and again and again.

It's to my understanding that Drupal 6.X will no longer be supported once Drupal 8 is released, and that day is getting closer and closer, yet the documentation for Updating to 7.x remains incomplete for over two years now. WOW!

The Drupal forums are literally riddled with users beckoning for help as they all race to update before getting left behind. Very few people have made the upgrade successfully, and the forums eerily dictate that.
There's many, many, more people with serious errors and hurdles trying to update then there are successfully updated sites.
When is the update process from 6.2.2 to 7.x going to be ironed out and become an actual update process, instead of the Russian Roulette, risky chance that it is now.

Even after following the Updating to 7.x documentation to "T", I continue to get the following error.

OK, next post-upgrade problem: after upgrading from 6.x to 7.8 and updating and enabling all modules I've found that I don't see anything for the Views module (I'm running 7.x-3.0-rc1) in the admin/structure interface. I'm running ctools 7.x-1.0-rc1. I've tried clearing the cache multiple times. What am I missing (besides the Views menu)?

I'm in the process of upgrading a site from 6.x to 7.x. I successfully (I think) completed all of the steps up to and including the core update. Now when I try to access the admin pages to continue with module updates I get this error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function db_result() in /home/name/public_html/modules/php/php.module(74) : eval()'d code on line 4

I'm running PHP 5.2.14. What can I look for to get past this?

I am facing strange problem after updating couple of modules and drupal version from 6.20 to 6.22. I am loging in with administrator user and do not get my admin panel. It seems like my user do not get right permissions. I get the website as regular authenticated user. I cleared both cash and settings tables, then ran update.php, but still same problem. I checked users table, my user has userid=1 (administrator). Help, pls.. if you can.

I have installed a client on Drupal in 2008. Now their site is due to a major update so I am wondering what would be the best choice, really ? Is it moving everything to WordPress, or updating 2008 Drupal to the latest one available (which would probably ask for plugins to update too and maybe more trouble unknow at the moment).

Your anwser ?

Could someone point me in the right direction with regard ti upgrading from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7? I currently have a non profit website I have inherited that is running on Drupal 5 but I have never upgraded drupal before and really aren't sure of where to start with it.

So what exactly is involved in upgrading properly? This website on average gets 30,000 or more hits a month and I really don't want to screw it up.

Any help would be great!