Interesting - thanks for posting. I always assumed that all of those initial-state decisions had been made *before* Satoshi posted the whitepaper. I guess because of that comment he made in that list thread to the effect of "I'm almost ready to post the code."
He *was* just about ready to post the code. This was a debate about what value an already-defined constant ought to have. In fact I've already posted an archive of his code from just a few *days* later in another thread here for historical interest.
Hal and I were essentially giving it a last-minute looking over to see if we thought there was any way to attack it. I have the impression that Hal communicated with Satoshi a lot more than I did, but he was looking at a much tougher problem. The blockchain structure is essentially a mathematical proof -- very straightforward, you follow it and you can say with reasonable certainty that it's right or not. But a scripting language is generative. And generative structures present exponentially more attack surfaces.
Re Finney - if he was blocking bitcoin op-codes, I wonder what he would've thought of Ethereum's scripting lang. 
You're kidding right? Ethereum's scripting language is limited only by the amount of steps it will run a calculation. Hal would have pitched a fit about the Denial-of-Service possibilities.
(and I had to ask if you were Ray cuz your early posts on here were signed "Edward")
Yeah, I made up a fake person because at first I didn't want people here to know who I was. I was kind of afraid they'd get freaky about it.