When traveling on Jan. 25, I got so many calls from US updating the status of my flight that it got annoying. Not sure what my settings were, but maybe I should have it it on SMS.

I think the real issue was maybe that you had your settings and spam filter wrong. It sounds like they notified you at 5:45AM for a 9:30AM departure, that's not too bad. I'm not completely sure of the crew rest issue, but yes, it could easily be that there were WX delays the night before causing a crew to be unavailable on full rest by 9:30AM.

You presumably could have waited for a later departure from DAB, but you chose to drive to MCO.

Delays and cancellations suck, but I'm not sure what else they could/should have done. If they had done something absurd like asked you for a reticketing fee to change the departure from DAB to MCO, yes, I'd have wanted to take a tire iron to somebody's head.

As a related note though, on Jan 25 when I was waiting for my flight, I got several phone messages saying "Your departure time has changed." The scheduled departure was 10:30PM. They kept pushing it, to 11:25, then 12:02, then 1:15, then the last call I got said 10:30PM. It was more than a little confusing that the final call really meant "Flight has been cancelled." I was already in the airport by then, so I worked it out quickly enough. But it was still confusing, I had this brief moment of thinking maybe they were rolling out another plane to take us there.