I've definitely not given up on CKAN, we just do not have the required resources right now to put in the required effort it would take to host a solid CKAN instance in production.
Once you've nailed the process then anything becomes one-click deployable. It's just that DKAN's process nailing cost is far lesser than that of CKAN. However, I still would prefer to have a solid handle on CKAN as it would allow for much more flexibility and access to more up to date features.
I have yet to interact with the DKAN community. There is some activity in Google Groups but not as much as I'd like to see: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/dkan-dev
What is this CKAN as a service company that you run? The ones I've stumbled on are CKANExpress and Ontodia. Also, what are the exciting features you are referring to?
It's explained in more depth in the first article in the series:
> Green Button, a secure way to communicate energy usage information electronically using standardized RESTful API Web services and a common data format.
Whoops, discovered a mistake in my scraper that caused some records to be missed. Here's the new file, with all 2 million records: https://mega.nz/#!CQIyWYCB!u1_h2ej4meRtuMlFjE_O0QaCJW8M1Go0uXhQwTl259Y