My take on things:
Clearly they are not shipping in a first come, first serve on the orders as they were bought. Whatever. They are likely shipping based on the order that the orders were processed in. The order of processing could have many variables; size, color, plus versus regular, credit card issues, premier versus regular customer, time zone, location, system issues, etc, etc.
It also seems that space gray 64 GB and 16 GB seem to have shipped less then other models, but honestly the sample size on this forum is too small to fully be able to tell that.
Additionally it feels like those that were originally in the October 2 to October 13 date range are having their shipped, while those that started later either late October or early November ship date and were changed on Monday are less likely to receive their phones on Friday.
Again, even with 100+ pages of comments we are really small sample size statistically.
In my case I ordered around 4 AM Eastern time for my 64 GB space gray plus, but did not receive my order confirmation email until 8 AM or so. I then received a text saying congratulations my order has been processed at 9 PM-ish Friday night, and then another one early Saturday morning. Like others here Bank of America flagged my card as fraud after the second order (ordered a 64 GB space gray regular for my wife about 15 minutes before I ordered my plus). Luckily I noticed the text from Bank of America immediately and was able to fix the problem in under five minutes and my order was not canceled or flagged as action required. Like all of you I had the one dollar authorization for each phone, plus another authorization for the full tax amount for each phone (using AT&T next), and both of those dropped off yesterday.
My wife's phone will be here tomorrow via UPS, while there is still a chance I might get mine tomorrow as we live in Texas and they can do overnight tonight and still get it here in time, I believe I'm more likely to receive mine probably late next week or around the October 2 date.
Does it suck? Yes. Is it the end of the world? No. I will definitely be jealous on Friday when my coworkers are playing with their new phones, but I'll survive ;-)
I used the much improved Siri on iOS 8 to type this, so hopefully there aren't too many weird mistakes in this post! I love that it types out the words as we speak now instead of waiting till you're done!