If this coin is to succeed I think a few things must be done.
2. On the issue of the missing coins, I can't understand how "all efforts" as described by the OP were used to recover the data when the hard drive was said to have failed only that morning, exhausting all efforts to recover lost data is not a 2 hours and I'm done type of job. If there is a failed hard drive with this data on it then an effort, a real and exhaustive effort, should be explored to recover this data even up to paying a fee for a 3rd party to recover the data perhaps with funds raised by the community. If after truly exhausting all efforts to recover the data we find that the funds are indeed lost then there must be complete transparency as to how this situation will be remedied and ideally the decision will be put to a community vote before a final decision is made.
I wholeheartedly agree with your second point.
We need a better description of the broken hard drive symptoms.
Does it refuse to spin up, is it making a beeping sound, is it clicking, can it not be accessed by a laptop, is it no longer seen as a drive in My Computer?
Specialist companies can fix any of these problems and recover data from a hard drive, often for as little as $120.
We could sell a few stakes to pay for it and restore confidence in COMM quickly.