AFAIK, the only drawback of running 8.1 as compared to 9.1 (or 8.6 for that matter) is the inability to use CarbonLib 1.6 and run the apps that supposedly require OS 9. Many of those apps really only require CarbonLib 1.4 or later, but 8.6 and 9.x are the only OS versions that support that version of CarbonLib (which, incidentally, is pretty close to the same Carbon supported in OS X). Curiously, you can install CarbonLib 1.0.4 on OS 8.1 and achieve some compatibility that way....

OpenTransport is much more stable and faster in OS 9 than in OS 8, but I doubt you'll be spending much time doing serious network transfers on your 6200. Similarly, multitasking and multithreading are improved on OS 9, but the 6200 is really the limiting factor here and not the OS.

So, in short, you probably won't notice much difference between the two OS versions aside from speed. And that will be a largely subjective measure. Give 8.1 a try and tell us what you think! Do you think it is faster on the 6200?

Peace,
Drew