Stability is my main concern - the IC build we're using crashes pretty much daily, so that patch should be the first thing we do.
As for the new version, it looks like it was released 3 weeks ago, so it should be old enough that any critical issues have been found. I say we dig through forums and see if people are running into any new major issues. If they're not, I'm all for an upgrade, but if there's new crash bugs, we should wait until they're fixed.
I'm weary of installing pending mods, as they've likely seen very little use yet (and non-obvious crash bugs like that solar one have very likely not been encountered yet).
That said, here's what I think of those 5 once they're no longer pending, or have at least been used on several servers for long enough to get bugs reported:
Rocket Science - Terraforming by firing missiles at things, rocket flight, and eventually traveling to the moon. Awesome. I'd definitely like to see this once available. No SMP yet though, so it's moot for now.
Advanced Generators - I haven't done enough with the higher level IC stuff to know how useful this is or isn't, so I'm nuetral.
Iron Chests - This could help with inventory management, but I'm extremely weary of mods where a bug can delete entire inventories - especially with that note about upgrading to the current version. So... I vote yes, but only when it hits v1.
Charging Bench - Not much to say about this one... it's a nice simple time saver, go for it.
Force Field - I'm really not a fan of making things invincible on survival servers.
As for the absence of polls, there should be a "new poll" button right next to the "new thread" one. If there's not, something's screwy in the forum settings. I'll check with the test account after posting this to see if it's there for everyone (it *should* be).