Also, somewhere someone over at SE made the decision that open beta would only last 2-3 days and it would occur a week before go live date. That was a serious mistake and something a competent software project manager/director should have caught. With only 2-3 days of open testing you didn't have time to baseline your clients usage patterns or provide real life stress testing. Now your window to correct the issues before full product launch is measured in hours instead of days/weeks and the required "fix" may require more than a few lines of code to fix what most system architects would characterize as "poor design decisions"