I found t7->t8 straightforward with hand luggage although a bit of a haul! We got to lax at 11pm after Friday's 12:45 ba1....I would recommend doing it another day for the earlier ba1 if trying to get to lax and have time for dinner/sleep/hnl as we had to book the 7:30pm to lax rather than the 5:30pm. As an academic question we could have made the 5:30, just, but the ticketing side I don't know about.

Not sure I could survive to hnl on the same day as although I got around 3hrs sleep on the jfk-lax a321t, I was still a zombie by the time I got to the Hilton checkin desk at around 11pm and that was starting the day with only a 9am flight from dub rather than the much earlier one (7am?) you'd need to catch the earlier ba1.

As for it being worthwhile, definitely....even with our Dublin positioning flight being 3h delayed and thus us being shattered the night before the 'big day'. With flat beds available on the right routings you can catch up on sleep and in hindsight I should have done that on ba1. I even got a couple hrs on the lax-hnl flight, but not looking forward to the return this Friday which departs now at 22:30.