Wow! Thank you.
That was way more insight than I had even hoped for. you raise excellent points, some of which I have considered already. I will think on this.
One follow up: any opinions about WPMUDev’s Multi-DB plugin as a database solution (256 dbs)? It seems to me that with this setup (similar to Hyper-DB) I can move dbs to seperate servers if needed. I have gotten this working before in testing, never tried in production.
Thanks for your perspicacity
Regards, Max