I have big aversion to un hedged option selling, maybe due to lack of knowledge. Not something i would do anytime soon. Another version probably is to take future position and opposite synthetic future position in options - but that will only work if IB does not give some kind of margin benefit, have not tried it.
For now, i stopped trading with them as i was only testing a 2nd system, but in future, will trade in a group of brokers. So it wont matter as much if 1 of 3 broker is down for a few hours. Its still a hassle to manage all this.
5p settlement worked well, dunno if i got lucky. They did settlement after Friday trading, sent money on saturday and i had a lot of time to send it back. They also support almost-instant funds transfer through RTGS + without manual confirmation, which is nice.