Just so we are clear, I’m a volunteer with what appears to be an infinite supply of patience. I am not staff.
And you have $3000 worth of perfectly good kit and a “can’t do” attitude to getting it setup. If you want to use LoRaWAN, perhaps you could stop saying you aren’t in IT and just learn LoRaWAN like many others do.
As to the upgrade that “destroys your work”, v2 was built in the early days of LoRaWAN - the software is becoming harder to maintain in the face of increased traffic, upgraded specifications and original design decisions.
So 2½ years ago TTI designed & started on v3. They released it to us all end of January and told us clearly that v2 would be going read-only soon (originally April) and then turned off later in the year.
All of these servers that run TTN are funded by TTI - community users do not pay for the software development, server hardware or expertise in maintaining the systems.
So you’ve had use of a system for free that has given plenty of notice of what’s happening. So I’m sorry, but not sorry you’ve arrived at this state of affairs but all the information has been around for you to plan - you could have setup your devices on v2 before it went read-only (even if you didn’t physically have them) or you could have learnt how to setup for v3 earlier in the year.
I suspect if you have 100 hives and have spent $3000 on hardware that you are running a business, which is fine, but comes with some levels of personal responsibility to manage it’s affairs in a timely fashion.
If you believe you save money with these devices, then why not pay someone to create the firmware for you? Or invest in the time required to learn what you are doing with LoRaWAN - it’s not something you can just hack at and expect quick results.
As you must have got to a point where you originally setup your Arduino IDE and found some code and got the sensor code in place, I’m not sure why you can’t do the same with the newer code. It may take a couple of hours, but by reading the documentation for MCCI LMIC and searching the forum for the settings for the Heltec device you aren’t doing much different than you did in the first place.
You could search the internet for other beekeepers who use LoRaWAN - last week I sat and read a couple of web pages in German for someone on here who asked for assistance - in the end we established he need to update his firmware and I gave him the same links as I’ve just done above and he’s got things going.
Installing VS Code and PlatformIO is well documented. The documentation & setup of the LMIC-node is amazing and I believe it directly supports your device. And, bonus, if you can be civil, the library was created by one of the other moderators.
Over to you, your approach will determine your success here.