Could you tell I was a bit excited yesterday? You can test and re-test a million times in a dev environment, but the real world typically tends to throw some curve balls at you. Anyway Plugin Firewall AutoPilot Mode is working out exactly how I had hoped it would in the real world so I can go back to business as usual and get my focus back on some other things we are working on.
SSL used generally is a great way to put folks at ease, but unless you are actually performing some sort of transaction that should be secured/encrypted with SSL then it is really not necessary to do just for a general site like the affiliate site. It is just a standard WP site and is not doing any sort of transaction stuff that needs to be secured. We prefer to let PayPal handle all SSL transaction stuff since they are trusted worldwide.