First, please excuse my lack of forum experience /etiquette, but should I tap one of the Topic icons whenever starting a topic, and what do they all stand for? Suggest you pour yourself a drink, sit down somewhere comfy first. Long reed (sic).
I wonder if once the Robo_Techies have everything setup and completed to their satisfaction, they may start to make available to us more pier status information. Perhaps ahead of that time we make suggestions on what might be useful to us. To explain. Take a sip of your drink.
At times the popularity of certain scopes may start to impact on their data turn around times, while there may be spare capacity on others. You may have a list of targets for later consideration, which you would have done on one of the less popular scopes. This opens up the opportunity to get that data back a bit sooner while waiting for something from a backed up scope you've chosen.
Perhaps not a very clear explanation so let me know if further clarification is required.
This would be something the Robo_Techies (would appreciate an alternative name for these guys), may or may not want to do. A tedious manual task I reckon. Estimating how much imaging time there may be in the coming weeks is pretty much impossible, but an estimate would be fine. Possibly a weekly update on all the piers, or, ad hoc warnings when it looks like a pier may be coming "too popular" at the time. Maybe a traffic light system, red means there will probably be a delay in returning data in a timely manner, amber means tiny risk of a delay and green means no risk seen at present.
I have no idea as to what demand there may be in the months ahead on the imaging site or has been estimated, so this suggestion may be irrelevant. Personally I hope there will be a demand.