I would like to raise the counterpoint here: the team could not determine if it was an actual issue, or if it was due to the firehose of real data streaming into the testnet, which does not accurately account into pricing.

Valid, but if these reports are true, the team also could have used that data point as an inspiration for pre-emptively creating the patch that instead had to be deployed and replayed not only on witness nodes but on RPCs as well. In my view such an incident should have been a big red flag that pushing the changes as-is was simply a bad idea.

Which brings me to another point. For a good period of time, at least a few hours, the witness nodes were actually ready to allow us to transact (as they are capable of replaying faster), but transactions could not be broadcasted through RPC nodes because they first validate the transactions before passing them along to witnesses. (This is not first-hand information, and I have not verified its integrity, so don't take it as gospel.) If this is true, I think maybe it would be nice to make it possible (or more accurately, accessible) to broadcast a transaction you know is legit.

If we had that, the frontends including Steemit could have been updated quickly. API nodes might have been even more confused about resource mana, but maybe we could have gotten everything going again more quickly.