720 MB update, worked like a charm. Thank you all !
Current server issues.
I just updated my desktop, with no issues. It seems like the problems with the server are solved. Thank you!
I confirm, updated today, no problems
Final update.
Thank you all for your patience with this incredibly frustraiting issue and helping confirm it is resolved. 
Additionally @joebonrichie 's great work on eopkg was part of this weeks sync. Which means eopkg now handles timeouts properly making it much, much more resilent to connection issues. So you will not need until sh -c 'sudo eopkg up -y';do echo 'Trying again ...';done anymore.
Most users should be good with the default number of retries as in testing while the server was 
I managed to download 1156 packages without it failing, but if you have a particularly bad connection to the server you can increase the number of retries as explained here.
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