Congratulations on your decision. I think your boot times will be in the 6 to 10 second range with Red Lion gear. In some cases, I have to add a 5 second delay for my communications alarm tags in Red Lion gear because it boots up faster than the associated PLCs!
The thing about the Red Lion is that some of the things that are done for you, you need to build yourself in Crimson. The upside is that you can do almost anything and it is easy to re-use.
For multi-state indicators, I like to set them up at the tag level. Make the tag format type "Multi-state" and then select how many states you want for it. You can change the quantity at any time. Assign text to each state that you want to be displayed in correspondence with each value. Note the "Match Type". This option lets you choose Ranged or Discrete. If you choose Ranged, you can skip values that may be duplicates. If you assign all possible values to text, then the choice won't matter.
Do the same for the color type. Make it Multi-state and assign colors you want for each state to go with your text.
Now when you drop that tag onto a screen, it will be a Data Box by default and will show the text corresponding to the value just as you assigned it in the tag setup. To view what it will look like, on the tag Data Source tab next to Data Simulation, you can assign a value there and the editor will use that value when rendering the page editor views of the tag.
Note that by default, the colors of the Data Box are not tied to the tag. On the Data Box properties, there is a section called "Get from tag". If you tick the box marked colors, your colors assigned at the tag level will be called upon. The background color will only be sized to cover the font. I often want to have a slightly larger colored rectangle surrounding my indicators, so I will do one of two things: a) on the Figure tab of the Data Box, I will set the Fill Format to Tag Background and popluate the field with the same tag as the data source. With that done I can adjust the size of the rectangle enclosing the Data Box and the whole thing will be colored. b) use a Panel from the core primitives and add my tag as Data to it (right click menu). This method also requires me to tie the panel color to the tag color and then deal with the edges and highlights if I want it to be perfect.