It only affects fleet chat; the XMPP connection to public chat channels is working just fine. There must be something wrong on guilds.crypticspace.com that isn't affecting channels.crypticspace.com. Anyone from Cryptic care to comment?
Considering there are literally thousands of people using the CombatLogReader that is the official DPS meter of the DPS channels, I think your caution is excessive. Use what everyone else does.
If you take him to the BOFF Skills trainer on Qo'nos in the First City Barracks and try and train him in any Science skills it reports that he can't be trained.
More likely that most of the problems are the load they're experiencing from the open beta of Neverwinter. It is no coincidence that most of the maintenance windows for STO have coincided with maintenance on NWO. I can't imagine LoR testing causing an order-of-magnitude increase in traffic, but open beta of NWO certainly…