+ past the December block-reward-drops-to-25
I'm kind of surprised that even Gavin worries a bit about this.
It's not that he worries, it's just something that we need to prove as working in production.
There's a difference between testing something in a lab (testnet) and making it work in production ... we need to get this level of confidence.
You'll have to wait to December to test that everybody orphans your 50BTC generate hack block though.
and also...
After we decide that it's out of beta, feature complete and tested, and we won't have any need to reset the blockchain back to block 0?