Regarding the coins you sent to poloniex they will be there when the wallet is back up you just can't see it on your balances because it's temporarly disabled, and you poloniex has always had a problem withdrawing and deposting steemit tokens but you can avoid all of this and use blocktrades, changelly or the best one is bittrex.
Well thank you for the good news... I hope it pans out. Too bad these processes are so long, I was hoping to catch VERI before a major exchange adopts it.