I would like to acknowledge @AlexCobb_ for this post idea. He's been doing great work in the Ripple community, spreading the word.
Ripple has been doing a lot behind the scenes for the last few months. Brad Garlinghouse mentioned publicly that unless they reach the magical number of 200, they are not going to announce them individually. XRapid is going into production mode and unless there is specific demand by the 8 Clients who were piloting XRP and XRapid, I dont see a reason why they are hurrying going into live production. Thats something to think about!