I would not worry about the "you old farts are afraid of change" messages. I was following the discussions about Windows 8 and from the first RCs the opinion was neatly split between those that tried it on a tablet ("it's neat") and those that tried it on a desktop or notebook ("Are you fucking insane?!?").

Win 8.1 allows you to downgrade to Win 7 or Vista. It's probably too late now, but you can install Win 7 with a licence for Win 8.