I hear the first weekend is VERY busy but, I doubt Friday will be as bad as Saturday and Sunday. I'd skip it if I could because we are at WDW for 8 days but... We are going to EPCOT Saturday becasue, my husband and his brother are doing Dive Quest. My BIL,SIL and nephiew are only in for Fri-Sun. so we are semi-sticking together. They want to tour EPCOT on Sat. We have dinner reservations in France because, I didn't want to fight the lines at the Food and Wine Festival. We were there for the last weekend of the festival last year and it was pretty busy. We still had a nice time and the lines were not too bad for the food late in the afternoon but, we did opt to skip some samples we really did want to try because of lines later in the evening. But, hey its Disney. We had a good attitude so, we had a good time!
Regarding FW, you may want to watch the fastpass times for the big rides, they sometimes run out of fastpasses by noon on some rides. So you could be pulling a fastpass to ride TT at 11 am or something. I would say it is a sure thing for Soarin'. I'd say Friday will not be as busy as Saturday in any part of EPCOT.