I agree with the above; You would be much better off, I think, working from the distro, than trying to convert a pretty old system into the new. SMJ's characterization of the upgrade from 095 to 096+ leaves a good bit of the work out. There are lots of other things that are very different and will require lots of tweaks and major system overhauls. In fact, in doing such an upgrade, I would actually ignore the realm stuff altogether (since you'll get the default realm, which is Brit, which is what you have now) and just work on the important basic code stuff... but there's just so much...
You'd have to carefully read the change log to see everything, but there are literally dozens of things that will need significant work going from 095 to 096+. As a couple small examples: spells: You need to alter the itemdesc entry of the spellbook. Easy enough. But you also need to completely re-write the magic system; 096 does not handle spells in the core at all.
The only exception I would suggest to starting with the 097 Distro would be if you had an active, live shard that you needed to keep going through the upgrade, which is my case. But I can tell you that even with an entirely custom script base, where pretty much no system, small or large, is anything like it was before, or would be in the distro now, I have a couple times considered just working from the distro instead of trying to move what I have from 095 to 096. If it were not for the fact that I need to guarantee complete data compatibility, and did not have a live shard that I am upgrading, there's no doubt at all; I would be working from the Distro.
Honestly, as great as WoD might be, there's nothing in it that can't be fairly easily re-created... and probably a lot more easily than upgrading from 095 to 096. Not only that, but to be frank, much of the WoD script code is outdated and not especially well-written. WoD was originally written for a much older POL core, and has sort of been piecemeal upgraded for each version, leaving behind lots of artifacts of old ways of doing things that simply don't make sense anymore... to say nothing of numerous plain bad coding methods to begin with
So, with dozens of times more words than the others took to say the same thing, again; I think you would be much better off working from the 097 distro and, to boot, you could help out the entire POL community at the same time.