Bendbox Great to hear you make good use of it. In general, if you have v7 already, just install v8 and during the first run, it will check if plugins are compatible OFC it will show RN is not after the whole rhino initial stuff you just run Rhino command _SetDotNetRuntime you close Rhino and open it again, after that, you go to Rhino > Options > Plugins and you pick Install and you pick RhinoNature.rhp which is located in its install directory. As it was already activated in v7 you don't need to activate it in v8 as RN is activated per device not per Rhino instance or version.
If you want to go the other way around, you can install Rhino 8 but do not open it right after installation then indeed change the shortcut to R8 with /netfx argument, then as it will load it will check plugins and it will see RN as compatible and basically you don't have to do anything else and it will run as usual.
To be totally honest I don't understand the v8 movement to DotNetCore as a primary runtime, I understand that NetCore may be faster etc, but I think more important here is that it is interoperable between Win and Mac and this might be the main reason. That being said RN has to move to NetCore in order to be future proof, how it relates now to already existing plugins I can't tell though old plugins that were running even since v4 like eg. BoltGen might have issues with running on v8+. In the case of RN two major factors have to be fulfilled, one render engine integrations, second keep RN operable with the upcoming Shape plugin as it will be IMHO a game-changer, and using it with RN will be a complete killer for Archviz tasks.
So to summarize the topic, I'm preparing RN to go entirely NetCore way, though it may be not worth jumping out from the NetFramework train yet (as it rather seems to be still early point of transition between runtime frameworks in rhino plugins global environment).
I hope this somehow clears things up for you.
