Hi @thebloomroom, there are a few, first of all—we will no longer support Magento 1 as of November 2018.
This post from Atwix does a great job explaining the performance, seo, security, admin, ease of upgrade, etc improvements: https://www.atwix.com/magento-2/magento-1-vs-magento-2/
Also, there is already no longer feature development on M1, only M2.