Version compatiblity issue. Need to downgrade

[Steven Nemetz]

I have what appears to be a version incompatibility issue.
Our infrastructure is managed by operations team using terraform 0.9.6
Applications are managed by developers using terraform <= 0.8.8. They cannot use >= 0.9 until some of their tooling is upgraded.
The terraform for the applications access the infrastructure remote state for various values.

This had been working fine until an ALB was created in the 0.9.6 side
Now when the applications attempt to access the infrastructure remote state, they get:
* data.terraform_remote_state.main_ecs_cluster: Decoding state file failed: json: cannot unmarshal object into Go value of type string
 :server:terraform FAILED

The simplest short term solution appears to be downgrade the infrastructure side to a version that 0.8.8 can read the ALB settings
 
Questions:

• Any other better ideas?
• How to downgrade terraform with remote state?
• What terraform version should 0.8.8 be able to handle?

Currently my idea on how to downgrade is:

1. remove ALB
2. edit remote state version
3. downgrade terraform
4. update remote state
5. Add ALB

Thanks