Updated race cond handling for member badges gen

Updated race cond handling for member badges gen

This change removes the universal 0.5 second sleep prior to querying the
database about the membership since date.

Instead, the process now goes right ahead with the query. It sleeps for
2 seconds if the first query did not succeed, then it re-attempts the
query a second time and continues on as before.

This should cost less time on average while catching more race
conditions with the longer conditional sleep.