[TRACKING] Improve container engine state handling

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Motivation

We have identified a few areas of improvements wrt to state handling during the container lookup cycle, see #1595 (comment).

This issue serves to track progress in this regard.

It is also related to #291.

@gnosek @therealbobo @mstemm @leogr

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Please also explore #1707: It's incorrect to initialize a lookup to SUCCESSFUL, by the way. I believe this is the strongest indication of a very suboptimal shared design across the container engines we support.