I will definitely vouch for SHIV being super-recommendable at this point for people who hadn't played it yet or have only played it a long time ago. Great thing IMO to occupy your time while SHV hopefully gets much-needed fixing-up.
I did a full-war playthrough of OM leading up to SHV's release and I couldn't be happier.
As for Ducimius' review,
Actually that was more generous towards it than I'd expected from you, but all in all, I can't emphasize enough that under the unfortunately-obvious layer of unfinished-ness and crap that attracts too much attention in the game, there is a goldmine of extremely good stuff.