As for the bad timing of the release on Thursday, it was regrettable. I apologized already, and I'm happy to do it again.
FWIW, I circled back on our end and discovered that we weren't given complete information by the publisher regarding event timing. That's why our person who supposedly was "in the know" didn't flag a conflict when we asked her. Could we have double-checked all that information ourselves? Yes, we could have. SHOULD we have needed to double-check it? That's a separate question that we'll be discussing with the publisher. Suffice to say that we were so focused on bug fixing that we (wrongly) assumed we were given accurate and complete information. The rest, as they say, is history.
At least we got our timing corrected for the next night's hotfix.