[aweisensel]

My company is trying to update our websites look and feel and are considering the jump to the newest XCart 5.
We currently have 4.4.3 and it is HEAVILY modified, mostly on the administration side of things. We are using a lot of custom build featurs in the admin side for order management. I'd say somewhere easily over 500 hours of additional tweaks that I've put on there.

The reason is our site is currently not mobile friend, nor is it responsive. We are aware of how this plays into natural SEO and for those and other reasons like modern look and social media connections, we desire the latest and greatest.

This brings me to here for advice. Its my understanding that there is no upgrade path from 4 to 5 and you are limited to data migration. Is there a reasonable way to have 1 website communicate in some capacity with 2 databases? Would I have to take this task on manually?

Are the database structures similar enough between the versions or ultimately the only way to get what we want is to repreat the hundreds of hours of work on the new XCart?