I will try to answer some of your questions here again, but from now on I would suggest that you open separate Talk posts per sub-topic. There is a little bit too much in here, it goes in many directions and the focus might be lost. When posting, try to pick the most suitable category and tags to maximise the chances of your post to be spotted by the appropriate community members. Also I would suggest to not post on behalf of other people of your organisation. Instead, make sure that whoever is facing a technical issue signs up, comes in here and describes the exact steps taken and how they have failed.
Ref App modules compatibility
Please ask your developer to open a specific thread about this, we cannot take action without more feedback.
About the Ref App 2.4
You are correct that, at some point, the official download page was offering Platform 2.0 with the set of modules for the Ref App 2.4. That is unfortunate and it had been addressed, as you have seen by yourself. I am not sure what may have happened but it seems that this very specific step of setting the download links is an infrequent, manual process.
I would agree that the release process of the Ref App distro has not always been optimal. Our issue with it lies more on the fact that some released modules would still hold dependencies on SNAPSHOT artifacts. But that doesn’t impact the built binaries available for download, it is rather a problem for people developing around the distro.
Even though Ref App 2.4 is the latest official release, I don’t believe it is used as such by anyone (yet, but that would have to be confirmed of course). Implementers build their own distros starting from the Ref App, but it is quite unlikely that it is used literally out of the shelf. But should you consider using the Ref App distro I would suggest then to stay on top and try to get 2.5-SNAPSHOT running and adopt the 2.5 release as soon as it is out (and that’s going to be soon I believe.) This is because version 2.5 will be the first release based on Platform 2.0 and that is definitely the way going forward.
Your timeline
If you are running out of time, then you may consider hiring an OpenMRS service provider. If you cannot do that then please ask more specific questions through specific posts, see my initial comment.
Good luck.