User preferences and settings are generally not preserved between major versions. There are many reasons for this, but the most important one is that architectural changes in the application may render the prefs files unreadable/meaningless/inapplicable/incomplete.
In other words - there's no guarantee your previous preferences/settings will work in the new version.
Another thing is that user preferences easily get corrupted over time, because they are rewritten every time you close the application. So it might not be such a bad idea to start with a fresh set.
This is at most once a year. It usually takes me about ten minutes to set the application up when a new one arrives. And by then, it happens that I change my mind about a few things.