Do I understand correctly, launch is at 8 PM and then roughly 8 hours of mining with 0 rewards and then solo mining until someone makes 5k and launches a masternode?
i wouldn't mine anything that offered zero rewards... but don't these things usually zip through.. because difficulty will need time to re-adjust so there's be no blocks for about (PUT A NUMBER HERE) days; If nobody mines it.
yes, essentially it's dead time, but it will go quickly. No need to waste energy mining it. The reason we aren't just premining through the blocks is for transparency.