Yup, the little speculation I have in mind is already a *lot *of work. :/

They will totally cut corners to focus on the main events, even though the schedule tends to indicate more work than S07.

For instance, they can show us the Wall attacked S07E07 and cut jump to the survivors reporting the breach at Winterfell S08E01.

That would be underwhelming to us, but in the prod it makes sense if the breach is considered a plot formality. Will see next episode! :)

I personally think the VFX and animation stuff they will have to do will be outragious. We may get more direwolf action again.

Every WW scene needs VFX. Atmospherics and extensions. The wights needs some post prod, but they can cheat like they did for the ambush E06, using only human extras (Yup I saw what you did there D&D) and use some CGI wights here and there for the big battles.

We have giants on the menu, a wight Dragon, and they went to the pain of making a CGI bear. Production wise I would reuse the bear.

We have a dragon dance in the pipeline. The Night King using his own wight dragon on humans, though they can skip this and just show undead viserion when it's meaningful, or just the aftermath of its attacks. They did put the dragons mostly offscreen during S07, they will reiterate.

Yes Nymeria's apparition point to the direwolves coming back. The CGI bear let me thinks they are willing to make the effort to make a furry animal. But they did cheat putting the scene in a dense blizzard so we can't have a clear look at it. The easy way to do this would be to use the real wolf for static shots with little human interaction, use CGI wolves for the action. A lot of cheating for the fur and mostly use the CGI doubles for background and fast action shots.