We are starting a new project with Moodle as a framework. The objective is to offer learning courses for an academic institution online. Essentially scorm & quiz activities. Part of the work is to create a customized look & feel, our developer suggested Moodle 3.4 since Moodle 3.6 the latest release has theming layer done differently & not easy to customize. Now our developer recommends using Moodle 2.8 as it is the easier version to do the theming work. I believe using the latest version is as the way to go & the developer will have to elevate himself to learn the new theming layer. I would love to hear how you see this situation.
I am not a themer but I do work for Moodle and I would definitely NOT recommend Moodle 2.8. It is no longer supported. I would always recommend using the latest Moodle version, especially if you want to appear professional in your course offerings.
One main reason to go for Moodle 3.5 LTS or higher is the fact that it's themes are built upon Bootstrap 4, whereas older versions of Moodle (2.x) don't support that.
My recommendation is to build with Bootstrap 4, Moodle 3.6 or higher. Customisation is done in part through custom SCSS. There's a lot of documentation in this in the Moodle Docs Developers manuals (click the link to read)
Thanks, Mary Cooch & Joost Elshoff for your response. May I also ask about the availability/compatibility of plugins and themes for Moodle 3.x?
Shouldn't be too hard to consult the Plugins database: