I'll most likely do a fetch-bitcoind update after letting it all marinate a little.

And it's out ; signed.

I was hoping to defer this until after full removal of dumpblock, but now that I'm thinking of a schema change as the best path there, I'm less inclined to block release of these improvements on what's likely to be a somewhat heavier upgrade.

Behind the scenes, the schema and code updates for tracking the full set of block metadata and current unspent outputs are drafted, with a variety of functionality and performance testing ongoing. This includes a process to cleanly migrate user data from the prior version, although a full rescan will certainly still be required. Preliminary results indicate around 5 days to scan and 24 GB for the database. And it does indeed do away with use of dumpblock!