Just wanted to do a quick follow-up post now that we've taken our trips:
As a reminder, we had a party of 3 traveling DEN>FRA on the 744 and a party of 4 on the return. When deciding on seats we went with row 84 (bulkhead, mid, upstairs) on the way out and row 1 on the way back. After experiencing both, in our opinion we all preferred the upstairs in row 84 for a number of reasons - while being in row 1 was good (very little foot traffic, novelty of the curve) it felt much less spacious, had less storage options available, and generally just felt busier in the nose. Upstairs felt more spacious, was quieter, and the storage options were much better. Biggest downside to upstairs was having only one lav but it was never really an issue.
In both directions service was great but food was meh....
Anyway, just my$0.02