[ye-olde-sysrq]

Also, if you asked me to pick my poison: things get partially available / degraded for a long period of time, or there's a blip of full unavailability during a cutover, I'd pick the latter 9 times out of 10. I find people are pretty good about writing code to deal with "does it work y/n" but people are often a lot less good about "does it nominally work but is going so slow it will never complete / other things will time out in unexpected orders before this finishes / etc". Some of the worst incidents I've seen were "partial" outages that spanned a long time period until the right thing could be drained/kicked/whatever.

[dmattia]

This took me a long time to accept in my career, but I do believe you've summarized this in a way that rings true for me as well.

[sharadov]

Take that one big hit vs death by a thousand cuts!