Not sure about point 2 (I'm not in the EU) but as for point #1 -
I thought communication from Bioware throughout everything has been phenomenal. Forums, twitter, facebook, fansite summits and conventions have all been used liberally to provide a constant stream of communication for a long time. Aside from having a live feed of the developer offices I'm not sure there is more they can do.
We do have a grace period now (48 hours)... I think it looks really good on BioWare to take the community feedback to heart.
Maintenance is unavoidable, especially during a launch. I think it's good that BioWare has chosen non-peak periods to do this and even communicated the times to us in advance for the EGA week. My only hope here is that the time to perform this maintenance reduces as time goes on.