The whole roll-out was surprising, although this was my first HF so I had no knowledge of what was done previously..
I was expecting some sort of beta fork that ran for a couple weeks in parallel and replayed transactions from the main block, then a test announcement that hard-forked but threw all changes away, then a switchover.
Instead, the platform was essentially useless to me for a few days and I got info on what was happening and when it might be fixed via twitter. ¯\(ツ)/¯
I hope the engineering team can learn from this.