CDR/CDRW formats and software

With all the recent growth in the CDR/CDRW world, I'm once
again faced with incompatibility issues in terms of CDR/CDRW
formats and CD creation software.

I used Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4. Liked it a lot,
especially since all conceivable modes of CD access was
supported, including direct write to CDR (packet-writing) in
a UDF-like fashion using Direct CD don't know if this was
proprietary Adaptec format or not).

I get a new CD writer (Lite-on) that's not supported by Easy
CD Creator 4 and which comes with Nero 5. Since it supports
Mt. Ranier, the InCD that comes with Nero now formats CDRWs
as such, which can be read from non-Mt. Ranier drives but
can't be written (even by InCD). Major inconvenience in
terms of compatibility. It also seems that InCD cannot do
the packet- writing mode to CDRs and cannot coexist with
DirectCD. Does InCD support the old UDF format for CDRWs at
all, since I'd like to keep using my old CDRWs in their old
format? Can non-Mt. Ranier drives ever write Mt. Ranier
formatted CDRWs, using some "software" mode?

Any recommendations as to what CD writer software suite or
combination would allow me to keep using the old media as
they had been formatted and yet go forward with new formats
such as Mt. Ranier for CDRWs? I use Win98, but would like a
forward path to Win2K or XP.

This shenanigans with CDRs and CDRWs is yet another
annoyance of the entire removable media business. The lack
of tape backup standards and backward-compatibility was
always a major detraction. Just as the CDR/CDRW world
seemed to come together, along comes these non-backward and
non-forward compatible features again.

Give me the good ole' floppy, where you weren't constantly
upgrading writer software/drivers with every new drive, and
whose 1.4 defacto format standard kept compatibility as an
utmost important feature, as it should be.

Thanks for any comments.