Should I stop DE farming and just go to TH9?

I am virtually maxed out. The only things left for me to upgrade are my Barbarian King, about 40 walls, some barracks and the DE troops.

I didn't want to upgrade before because I wanted to get a level 10 king and have enough DE left over for an Archer queen. But having been completely out of the game for a long time, I am very rusty when it comes to DE farming. So should I just wait till TH9 to restart DE farming? Also, I have about 500 gems, and I get a lot thanks to those obstacles. Should I just gem the Archer Queen?

When your rusty now . U will still be rusty when your th 9 . So just farm now .

I was going to save up 40'000 dark elixir before upgrading to TH9, but I ended up upgrading to TH9 with ~2'000 de in my storage, because I was too scared to lose my 6 million gold in the high trophy ranges.

I just went with it and thanks to my two de drills (lvl 1 + 3) and a few lucky raids (I was focusing on gold and elixir mostly), I was able to get my archer queen within a week.
I'd say upgrade to TH9 now. TH9 is just so much nicer and I am glad that I did not waste more time upgrading my king to level 10 or all my walls to level 8. The new toys you get as TH9 make defending so much more easy and the loot does not drop off as much as you might think.