Finder problems

I have a long-winded sob story and I'm wondering if anyone with a similar client/server configuration has, or is, experiencing the issues I'm seeing.

Seven Mac Pros running Mac OS Snow Leopard (10.6.8) running Adobe Creative Suite software. The Macs connect to and mount an AFP shared volume on a Mac Pro Server running Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server (10.6.8) - everything worked fine (other than issues acknowledged by Adobe that they don't support opening files over the network).

Upgraded some of the Macs to Adobe Creative Cloud 2014,which isn't supported on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6.8). Upgraded the Adobe Creative Cloud Macs to Mac OS X Mavericks (10.9.5) and Mac OS X Yosemite (10.10.4). The users on those upgraded Macs report having Finder issues such as:

• Clicking on a folder on the mounted volume and it taking up to three (3) minutes to display the contents of the folder
• When saving files to the mounted volume, it takes up to twice as long to save the file than the Mac OS X Snow Leopard Macs
• Intermittent permissions issues
• When the volume is mounted as an SMB volume, when saving files additional files are saved. Example: For a screen grab "Screen Shot 2015-04-07 at 7.53.28 PM.png", files "Screen Shot 2015-04-07 at 7.53.28 PM.png/AFP_AfpInfo", "Screen Shot 2015-04-07 at 7.53.28 PM.png/com.apple.metadata/kMDItemIsScreenCapture", and "Screen Shot 2015-04-07 at 7.53.28 PM.png/com.apple.metadata/kMDItemScreenCaptureType" are created.
• No files appear to be present in a folder where Macs running Snow Leopard verify files exist in the folder.

Because we're a "frugal" company, we opted to look for another solution rather than simply upgrading the Mac OS X Server to Yosemite (we would have had purchase a new RAID and HBA, and upgrade the backup software - may as well buy a whole new gizmo).

In creating a workaround for some of the production issues, we discovered that connecting the upgraded Macs (Mavericks, Yosemite) via SMB to a Windows Storage Server 2012 reduced the number of issues.

Anyone else experiencing or have experienced issues with Mavericks and Yosemite in a client server environment?

Anyone running a Mac OS X Yosemite Server software? Good results? Would you recommend we bite the bullet and go Mac OS X Yosemite Server?

Thanks!