The official Steemit, Inc. testnet was originally announced here:
https://steemit.com/hardfork20/@steemitdev/hardfork-20-testnet-details
It bootstrapped and activated HF20 the same day.
I'm not against it but some people stated (some top20 witnesses included) that it is almost impossible to fully test a hardfork upfront, and I want to say contrary, it is perfectly possible and we can start right away.
There were specific things that we were looking for with the original testnet deploy. We wanted to know how it transitioned from HF19 to HF20, and that looked good. We wanted to know how transactions from mainnet copied over to testnet would fair, and that looked good too:
https://github.com/steemit/tinman#gatling-transactions-from-mainnet
One of the things we could have probably tested in the month prior to HF20 was to delay transition between the bootstrap of the testnet on HF19 to HF20. Maybe a 5 or 7 day HF20 activation delay would have revealed a hint about the difficulty in the new features, but we didn't test that scenario.
So, there was possibly a lack of imagination. But at least we have that knowledge moving forward.
Let's prefix everything "fake-", so that we have: Fake-STEEM(fsteem), Fake-SBD(fsbd), Fake-witness(fwitness), Fake-market(fmarket), fake-steem.com, fake-steemconnect.com, fake-you-name-it. If we make everything functional, we can have a working simulation, where we can freely experiment without the worries.
That's pretty much what we do by using a chain-id (without the prefix, just using different asset symbols instead). We use a unique chain-id for the testnet so that transactions cannot be mixed up between blockchains. Have a look:
RE: Fake STEEM, SBD, witness, market, condencer and so on: Let's test steem for real from now on!