Significant robustness improvements

Robustness fixes for:
e-mission/e-mission-docs#567
e-mission/e-mission-docs#572
e-mission/e-mission-docs#574
e-mission/e-mission-docs#580

Note that these are primarily robustness fixes; they ensure that we are able to recover from bad situations. They do not prevent the bad situations from happening in the first place. But they are critical for long-term data collection that allows us to observe human behavior over the entire habit formation cycle.