OK time to put some answers here.
Firstly, apologies to everyone for the lack of words, it simply comes down to there, both me & Frey work a lot of hours at our jobs, and when we get home for the end of the day we don't usually have the mindset for discussing these type of complex admin issues daily, and mainly just during limited hours we both have off (which is further consumed by RL obligations/stuff). Hence, what turns out to be a week of real time is no more than a day of time I have and Frey has to get stuff done.
We've still be working
a lot behind the senses for preparations. Most recently we've been doing infrastructure upgrades and upgrading to more modern servers and OSes. For the most part we have completed these, though not completely done. While you don't notices these upgrades and fixes, they will matter quite a bit towards handling any sort of stress across the database, game server, or web servers combined and we don't want to cut any corners, so yea it has been slow, but steady progress on this end. While not complete, it's done enough we can proceed further down the line.
Pretty much though now I believe we are down to figuring out exactly which option we want to use to deploy CE in the most efficient manner, it's a bit more involved than that sounds, but the hardest part is over with so I say we are just about there.
I know your eager, so am I, but this extra stuff were doing will help a lot so you don't have to worry about server reliability (which is a reward in itself!), that's for sure
Finally apologies for any lack of word, we just don't have a dedicated PR person and time is short! Prepare to fire phasers.