Hi @jdmulloy,
Not sure if this helps, but we followed Open edX’s update guide, and from dogwood to eucalyptus to ficus to ginkgo to hawthorn mostly what I’ve done is take mongodump of existing server make a new server of required version and put the dump there, for example if I wanted to go from ficus to ginkgo I took a dump from ficus version, install ginkgo in new server and put mongodump there.
That is as far as I remember, but in between if edX’s update page had any commands to update mongo through playbooks, we probably did go that way because any time I needed to update I always go to the version update guide and execute the steps there, though I don’t remember running the playbooks that you’ve mentioned.
Did Hawthorn to Ironwood update the same way once in devstack docker, haven’t tried in production, also haven’t tried Ironwood to juniper as well.