Sage advice which I will take.

Before I go, I'll just like to say screw Gavin and the Bitcoin Foundation horse he rode in on...or at least rides into the future.  I'm sorry to not be more hopeful, but at this point I see Bitcoin to be not much more than a cash cow to be milked.  I'm counting on the army of mouth-breathing think-they-are-libertarians here to continue to help me line my nest with $USD and they have not let me down yet.

I do have confidence in the 'free market' and have confidence that it will eventually produce something the people of world actually need vis-a-vis distributed crypto-currencies.  What we definitely don't need is some corporate controlled one-world currency solution which is exactly where this thing is headed to be blunt about it.

I hope I'm wrong and you are right that there is still some hope for Bitcoin proper, but I'm not betting on it.  Were it not for Garzik and Maxwell I would have zero hope.  I will participate in what efforts I might be able to in terms of experimentation and such as they will likely produce useful data and code no matter what happens.