No, 8man normal & 16man normal both drop the same Columi gear. While 8man hard & 16man hard both drop Rakata gear pieces. The only other thing you get more of are materials, patterns, and the random gear items.

I have to agree with this. There is no reason for them to stop at four waves. No way their servers can't hold more than 3 days of pre-order people.

I think this is a big part of it. The waves are smaller than people thought they would be. They claimed to have hundreds of thousands of people on the servers during the last beta event. I don't see any way possible that doesn't get the first week of codes in on day one.