I'm not anybody in particular on this list, but my opinion is that when companies use Free Software and ask for $0 help on lists, they should write from a company list and identify the company, rather than some gmail address. If I were somebody important, I might make that a rule :-)
Overall, it looks like you need a consultant, or to hire a test engineer and actually run things on your staging servers. If you do that, or if you just upgrade, please report back to the list how things went so this can be mutual assistance. Can you confirm that you have permission to send an on-list message talking about how things went?
