While waiting for the Drillbit team to reply, some pleasant news to report -- 7 days uptime on BTC Guild with 4x 8-boards. I'd also gotten 6 days uptime a few weeks earlier, but thought it might just be a one off...

Three out of four boards running at 54:2:850, the last one at 53:2:950 to keep it at 20GH/s (otherwise it drops to 15~16GH/s at any setting using 850mV...). Rig details here:
http://drillbitsystem.com/forum/index.php?topic=45.msg2632#msg2632When all my boards were at 950mV, the longest they would last was about 2 days 6 hours, before at least one of them spat out only LIBUSB errors. Then a lot of stuffing around to get them working at 950mV again. Just happy for them to reliably hash away a week at a time (or longer), rather than only for 1-2 days max.
