I am still using Maya 6 & Photoshop CS.. haha
I just feel more comfortable this way.
The company that I work for is still using Maya 4 + custom maya tools,
which they find out it's more stable on Maya 4. In game, we don't need
many new features from the new maya.
Like what innison said,
In your case, you can export the mesh from the new Maya
and import to the old Maya. It works for all versions of Maya.