Good review, I agree with you on a lot of points. And I am not expecting any software ot be perfect.
But I would say that an outage lasting multiple hours is excessive in this day and age. And perhaps better testing and rollout M&P's are called for here in the Steemit ecosystem.
Throwing tainted data through the testnet would be advisable in my opinion.
One day, someone will knock and my door and invite me to the roundtable, so I can help discuss such things.