@news Great! Thanks for all the hard work!
As a note, I upgraded a test server with a very small database size and it was stuck with a white screen for several minutes. No idea how long that is going to be on a larger db. Anyway, it does come back automatically, so no need to worry if anyone encounters this. The error in the log was:
Call to undefined method Friendica\App::getLoggedInUserNickname()which seems to go away after the server comes back.