Replicaset initiation can "fail" with an error that indicates that initiation is underway and we just need to wait (i.e. not really an error). So when replicaset initiation appears to fail we attempt to give mongo some time to complete initiation by waiting for replicaset status to return a valid status with a non-empty member set.
If initiation *hard fails* then waiting for config will never work - leading us to report an EMPTYCONFIG failure that masks the *real* underlying error. So we need to improve the error reporting (report the real error) and also ideally only attempt to get config if it can possibly work.
This was discovered in the process of investigating bug 1340663.
The specific error that can be returned indicating initiation in progress is "local.oplog.rs is not empty on the initiating member. cannot initiate".
