How much did the Openni/Kinect image interpretation change from Fuerte to Hydro? [closed]

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I, again, need someone with deeper ROS knowledge to give me some pointed advice.

So after wrestling with camera_pose_calibration for a while in Hydro it has come to my attention that the old Fuerte packages need to be converted from rosbuild to catkin. However, I remember reading something that says the image interpretation in the Openni/Kinect stacks have changed so much in the newer distros that older Kinect-based packages are hard to use with the new Openni_launch and other packages. I'm willing to put time and effort into a conversion but I'd like to know ahead of time if this is a dead end. So I guess my questions would be:

1) From the title, how much and exactly in what way has the image interpretation changed?

2) Have people had much success with using older distro Openni/Kinect stacks?

3) Do you think this is a wise pursuit or should I look for a different method to combine all three Kinects into one RViz image? Or should I try to work entirely within Fuerte?

Thanks, I'm seriously stuck on my research progress and any knowledge would be a big help.