Thanks to everyone for their reasoned arguments and discussion in this thread! These changes are substantial and will require some modification going forward, so your comments and concerns here and in the future are appreciated and will absolutely be taken into consideration.
We'll be attempting to release the new code this afternoon provided everything goes well. Should we overshoot our 2pm (Pacific) deadline we'll try again tomorrow morning. At the moment everything is looking good. I'll start a new thread when we're back up.
Edit: We couldn't branch the build in time today so tomorrow morning it is. Thanks for hanging in there.