how do you <really> feel about the beta 8 candidate. was it sssoooooo horrible that the lowly rio supporters would suffer from life-altering and rio-experience-degrading glitches?

All I can say is that the Beta8 version had at least one pretty serious show-stopper which has since been fixed in Beta9. The Beta9 version is quite good and only seems to have small cosmetic bugs that shouldn't stop a release (no worse than any of the small cosmetic bugs in Beta7). I have a guess that it'll be up to at least Beta10 before you see it.