Can you explain how to set a user preference based on the number of edits a new user has? Has the VisualEditor team set up a script to roll back (i.e., undo) this change to the user preferences of new users if this experiment doesn't work well? Personally, I think it would be a little crazy to press forward with this experiment on June 19 as planned.
Based on what I have seen the few times I have fooled around in Visual Editor (not sure if I actually saved any edits or just said screw this and went with the regular editor), I also think that this is a bit premature.
If we need additional feedback, rather than automatically enabling it for half of the new editors, or even half of the new editors with X number of edits, we could provide a notice to new editors with X number of edits that asks them if they would like to try Visual Editor. We could provide a notice at the top of Visual Editor to allow them to easily change the preference back as well.
While this doesn't solve the template issue (and the clean-up that will inevitable come of that), it might work as a solution to the getting new users to test VE issue.
Thank you, Derric Atzrott