I finally did it! After several aborted attempts because of the QIF import problems, I have made the switch to MD. Below are a few observations and comments.

Don't underestimate the work involved to truly clean up the transferred file. I probably spent 30-40 hours getting the MD file correct. I am a bit anal, so likely went to more effort than most. Since I had numerous deleted accounts in Q, I had a mess. It became a mission to me to make the MD file as correct as possible. The two keys to make it work were adjusting the initial balance in accounts and utilizing a BlackHole asset account [see below].

Make the User Guide correct and up-to-date. It has many omissions, incorrect info and out-of-date info that make the new user's learning curve more difficult. This Discussion Group was quite helpful.

Be prepared to do numerous iterations to review accounts as you clean up since the Quicken QIF leaves hundreds, or in my case thousands, of orphan transactions that seem to have tentacles everywhere! I tried to keep the last couple of years accurate, which meant putting in numerous correction transactions that I could observe by having my Quicken file open alongside MD. I realize that I caused some of the problems by deleting accounts that were old and I didn't want to keep. For years older than a couple, see the next comment.

Ben Spencer's suggestion to set up what I called a "BlackHole" account as an asset that I can put all of those Quicken orphan transfers and transactions in, then set an opening balance to make it total $0, was a key to my being able to make the move to MD.

Warn new users that a Loan Account is different from a Liability Account. And tell how to change the Liability import to a Loan. [Support; Home; Questions - Is this method to change account type OK? - May 04, 2009

The online tools are great. I was able to directly download to credit card accounts for which Q insisted on having a web download. And the web downloads are easy.

The matching process is not intuitive, but I have learned it. I still don't understand how it handles a transaction that contains a split, or for which the possible match contains a split.

I will post any other important ones if I remember them.

So far, my observations are that MD will meet my needs, does some things worse than Q, but does many things better. I will see how the reports stack up as I use them. But I think I'm committed, as I've stopped keeping both up to date. See my Wish List in the Suggestions section.