Congrats folks! I’m super happy that this worked out for you. However…
I think we need to be very careful about how any changes to edx-platform and tutor will affect large, existing databases, and what the proper upgrade path for them is going to be. If the upgrade process is going to have to be disruptive (e.g. turn the site off, back up gigabytes or terabytes of data, and re-import with new settings), it might be worth combining this with whatever else is necessary for the MySQL 8.0 migration. For instance, the collation we will ultimately want is likely utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci, which isn’t available in 5.7.
@regis: Do you have thoughts on the migration path for something like this in Tutor?
FYI @jmbowman, who I know has thought about the MySQL 8.0 issue a lot.