Eventually i haven't been alone with my worries about the missing basic infrastructure like wallet and voting for the EOS mainnet launch.

There have been rumours for a while about an upcoming BP community wallet but nothing really with any meat on it, and that just two weeks ahead of the launch...
Now just a few days ago @summerskin published a call directed towards BPs and the larger EOS community for funds, in order to finalise a voting portal.

EOS - Peeking under the hood: Tampering with Scatter

Whereas the infos provided are still quite scarce, some (prominent) BP candidates and Devs: SW/eden, @NSJames, Fuzzy, @EOSDac, @EOSTribe, @EOS42, @EOSVikings, Cesar, Saltblock, @EOSBrazil have onboarded.

Summerskin has confirmed full transparency on funds collected and distribution of rewards, so i did my part in the funding and so should you if you count yourself among EOS enthusiasts and b1 can save on it's precious ICO income... (just joking).

What we know about the project is still a bit vague, the portal is about three weeks away from a beta launch they say, so it will go life at least shortly after mainnet launch (hopefully certain whales and exchanges wont have turned everything upside down by then, but maybe we will see the @Dan Hammer in action)

It looks like identity management (and private keys) will be handled by @nsjames ' Scatter. In short this is the EOS equivalent of metamask, maybe it goes a bit beyond that, with it's reputation management (and the RDIL airdrop).
Check out this video if you want to learn more about it
This was confirmed by Cesar, one of the project insiders:

It's certainly one of the most evolved projects providing basic features, and of course the decision of the bp community was likely not unfounded. Sounds quite reassuring and of course a huge success for Scatter:

Reason enough for me to take a closer at scatter and

try to make it work, especially as there is now a working Chrome-Plugin, a test-website and a comprehensive Video tutorial

In addition RIDL identities can now be imported into scatter (it works!), but thats not really relevant for our scope.

So what i tried, is to set up a test-eos account, enter it in scatter, and then use it to access the scatellet wallet to transfer some bucks.

Most of it is pretty well summed up in NSJames video, but...

...in the new version there are a few additional steps needed to do the trick:

1. You need to register a complete EOS account (id + keypairs) on the test-website (forget about generating a keypair inside scatter, as this doesn't provide you with an account-Name, that you'll need:
   

2. Link the account to your Scatter-Identity:
   First you need to set-up a keypair in scatter with the keys generated above, then editing your identity, in the account section, select the keypair you have just set up.
   Then you press import and in the field account-name, you need to enter, what the account-generation on the test-site has given you (how you named your keypair in scatter, again, is irrelevant. See the screenshot above for illustration.

3. Press SAFE on the upper right, without that your changes are gone.

With the account set-up, you can now go to Scattellet and access your wallet.

You select the acccount that you have linked to your eos and enter.

With that you can start sending around thousands of EOS. I did this between two of my test accounts and it works. I was lucky enough to meet a guy, who was just trying the same and we ended up sending back and forth eos between each other.
Of course all that happened inside the test-node that NSjames has set-up, it's not exactly userfriendly, there is no transaction history or anything, but it does what it's supposed to, and i was able to interact with that dadaist stranger, and transfers worked well.

You might have seen, on the screenshots, it's possible to add custom ip-adresses for networks for the EOS network, and it should be able to connect to other testnets:

And thats what I'll try to do, connecting scatter to an official testnet (maybe the Jungle-Testnet, as soon as it's back up). In case you have done that before yourself or seen any reference online that has some insight into how to do that, sharing it would be awesome!

At least it doesn't look that bleak as regards accessing your EOS and voting for block producers at least close to the snapshot. And scatter seems to be an important part of that, so important to know how it works.

The nearer we get to it the more i see a very bumpy mainnet launch ahead. But i am determined to cast my minnow-vote as soon as it's possible an not loose my precious EOS.

The information provided here sums up the results of my - finite - research. If you've found this useful, please up-vote and resteem. If you have spotted anything to add, please throw in your thoughts and comments! I am always happy to discuss and learn! Finally, none of this is financial advice, do your own research if you consider investing.