2018.02.19 - SMALL UPDATE:
No surprise.... the garage is still a mess, but things ARE slowly and steadily improving. It's is always darkest before the dawn...
The structural engineer gave me a few assignments that I can handle myself, so I started shoring-up the ridgebeam area with plywood / PL508 Adhesive / and 2x10 wedges to create a laminated "sandwich" at each of the rafter tie-in points. A sheet of 4x8 plywood was ripped down into 12" strips (4' long) and then the 40-degree angles were cut to match the roof pitch.
You can basically see the idea here.... one piece of plywood on either side of the roof rafters tucked up as high to the roofdeck as possible. With liberal amounts of panel adhesive. A 2x10 between them makes the whole thing stronger and beefier.
The first few are in place. For now, it's just held with a handful of drywall screws which clamps the parts together tightly until the adhesive can dry. I'm coming back later on with 1/2" carriage bolts which will run through the roof joists, and also through that center 2x10 blocking to effectively "pin" everything together on both sides. The final product should be insanely strong and complete overkill based on what I was actually told to do by the engineer. Ultimately, I will want to hang my old ceiling hoist in this area.... so having extra strength up there isn't a bad idea.
I took the advice of
@dremu and picked up a 12-pack of 5000K LED retrofit bulbs. They were cheap enough to be worth the risk, and since they only take about 12W to provide 90W of halogen-style light, it makes the wiring a lot simpler.
That said, I still had to pull all the drywall off around the breaker panel to gain access to add new wiring. Picked up a fistfull of new 20A breakers at the local Home Depot so that I could split the overhead lighting into 2 circuits. Even with 20 - 24 overhead LEDs on each side of the shop a 20A circuit will handle the load easily. I haven't pulled the upper plywood flooring out to allow more light in the center (yet) but even with just the 16 perimeter LEDs it is already feeling more like the "good old days" in my NH shop. LOTS of bright white light chasing all the shadows away....
More joist bracing and bolts..... then I can start thinking about cutting out the big rectangular hole overhead!!!
-G