RTM.start deprecation, and current connection problems

An issue I've been seeing lately is the lack of "online" presence for my bot. It appears to connect to the websocket, but then fails to light up green on the users list, and does not receive any Real Time Message (RTM) packets from slack.

This could be related to the evolution/deprecation of rtm.start, but I tried an anemic version of the bot code with just the rtm.connect and haven't been able to make any progress.

Links for reading:

• https://api.slack.com/changelog/2017-04-start-using-rtm-connect-and-stop-using-rtm-start
• https://api.slack.com/methods/rtm.connect

Q1: Is anyone else seeing any "bot online" problems?
Q2: Are there any updates in progress to break the rtm negotiation out into the rtm.connect, channels.list, users.list and team.info recommended?