Q. Do you really want to wait 9 months at Google for good, relevant data to become available. Or would you like to produce fresh new stuff as soon as it's available?
A. "Well we do want it there as soon as it's available. In fact, some things like our news crawl and blog search can find stuff within minutes of it being live. So there's always a tradeoff between how much do you trust certain pages how much do you rank certain pages. And the best advice I can give is don't worry or over think or try to strategize too hard over is -- or isn't -- there a sandbox. Just make a great site, with great content and a normal reason why people would want to link to you and visit your site. A compelling reason why people would want to link to your site. And that's going to help you capture the mind of the blogosphere and that's really the best way to let search engines find out about you too."
The sites that fit “no pages in Bigdaddy” criteria were sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site. Examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling.
Matts latest post on Indexing Timeline gives a great insight to what happened after Big Daddy.