George said:
I wasn't able to enter [my password], or CTRL + V it, not sure why.
Everything you do while in PuTTY is considered a unix command, and unix handles CTRL+* differently to windows; CTRL+C kills a program that you've ran from the command line, for example.
And the password doesn't show up in the console when you're entering it in unix either, which is why you probably thought nothing was happening.
PuTTY may be in beta, but as far as functionality is concerned, there's nothing wrong with it.
About the lack of recent support: there hasn't been an update in so long simply because it works; there's no point updating something that needs no update. Plus, don't just ignore the 5 years of development put into it.
I'd suggest you
read up on the command line. It's a pretty powerful and overwhelming tool and can be disastrous to the server if used wrongly (especially if you're doing everything as the root user). Ideally, reading books on it would be a better learning method; guides on the internet will suffice as a starting point, but they'll never cover all of it's complexities.
Ultimately the decision to which SSH program you use is up to you, but understand that using software that has more recent updates doesn't entirely mean it has less bugs (in fact, the need for more frequent updates probably suggests they have a lot of bugs that need fixing).