I agree with most of what you wrote here and have similar ambitions to create a farm for my family and hopefully a community around it. Glad to see you posting again. I just sort of stumbled over here and saw you had a new one!

Also if you are unaware the Steem dollars are actually worth about $7.50 right now (but have been slowly going down) so you may want to take profits or convert to STEEM to then power up with. I'm not sure if the internal exchange is working right though so you may have to use blocktrades or bittrex.