Benefits (and tips) of an upgrade from JBoss 4.2.x to JBoss 5.x, 6.x, 7.x and WildFly 8.x?

Please assume that I do not need to worry about development time and costs: I am interested in general technical benefits (improved performance? improved APIs?) and new features.

I am currently working on products using 4.2.x, and we consider a major shift for versions that are a long time ahead and need to converge.

I had a brief look at the release notes of each version and some articles about each release for 5.x, 6.x, 7.x and 8.x. But I would be glad to have first-hand feedback from people who have made the switch.

I noticed there are some important changes surrounding messaging (switching from JBoss MQ to JBoss Messenging), and that for JBoss 7.x it seems to change a fair bit its configuration layer. Then there's a lot more going on when switching to JBoss/WildFly 8.x.

Please recommend good articles pointing at pitfalls if you can. I found a few for migrations to JBoss 5.x, but not that many for 6.x or even 7.x, and someone else is evaluating 8.x for us now. Feel free to recommend alternatives as well if you think they are relevant, though I'd prefer to focus only on JBoss.

For information, we use a mix of JPF- and OSGi-enabled (using Eclipse Equinox) plugin-based systems, with clients developed in Swing (some deployed via WebStart).

Update: Though this question brought some great answers already, I think it deserves an update for WildFly (and actually, our internal projects delayed making the switch from 4.2.x to 7.x as originally planned to wait for WildFly). New thoughts and answers are welcome.

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