So did you manage to set up a testnet node in the end? It would be interesting to know if any major problems appeared during the testnet phase that could potentially postpone the release of their mainnet.
Yes I did. Although I did not manage to build the blindbid module necessary to participate in consensus myself yet, a binary release is included in the Dusk core. I could build the node after the team fixed the imports.
In fact, you do not have to build the node yourself. You can download a pre-built node.
I stopped running the node because currently it uses quite a lot of bandwidth. Several gigabytes a day. If you have unlimited data, that is no concern of course. It is a drop in a bucket compared to streaming 4K video.