3. Is it necessary to plan for an Akamai (or equivalent) hosting solution for optimized content delivery, or is that overkill?

fwiw, I have worked with Akamai in the past on larger dynamic sites and it led to some serious issues in regards to serving content to various regions. My US visitors ...

Ditto

Good question. :)

Interested in reviewing past patch notes to see what features have been added since 1.5.5 which is the release I am currently using. I am pretty sure this is the first patch information I have seen since i started testing this software.

Is there an archive on the site where ...