I stuck with TP through version 5, and even convinced my college teachers to let me use it for my programming assignments rather than whatever was on the college mainframe.
The manuals were indeed a huge asset. You didn't really need to know anything about the OS, or go digging for third party documentation online, which was important because there was no online.
That and Ralf Brown's Interrupt List, so I could do something useful.
I stopped with TP5. At that point, I was up to my ears in my thesis project, and was not going to change any of my tools. Plus I'm a real tightwad. By the time I finally finished my degree, got a new job, and a new computer, it was an Apple Mac. And the modern OS's kind of killed my interest in programming for a while.
Be glad you had that one. The other BASICs of those times where much more limited! GW was a little bit of awesome in it's own way. Oh, and POKE and PEEK.
I went from the necessity of A86 assembler, thru the desperation of GW-Basic .. finally finding Turbo Pascal, which was a revelation at the time, just this phenomenal product and superb piece of engineering.
Pulldown text menus, draggable text windows, editor out of the box .. fast compilation, wow - to me its one of the great monuments of computer history. I feel intensely nostalgic looking back on it now.
And their manuals were first rate.. classy all round.