At a guess, they're about to enter their third week -- their third active and awake week, anyway. They would have lost some time prior to entering the hotel: the surgery would have been the work of hours, but the subsequent healing would have taken at least a few days. (What little technology we've seen is in the 'currently possible' category, so figure no cell regeneration -- the tools being used are already in the box.)A secret escape plan would require finding either somewhere that wasn't covered by the cameras or knocking out a group of them for enough time to create a blackout zone. They have real trouble with the first, and we've seen that there's at least one backup camera for a given interior observation position. Also -- and this is a very big 'also' -- they're likely being observed in real time: I doubt anyone's just checking their footage once a day in advance of the reality show edit. Serious, coordinated attempts to create privacy will draw attention in a hurry. To some degree, they're speaking in public because there's no place which isn't public.
Codes -- well, they'd have to be developed in public. Doubletalk can be analyzed. Joe and Graham know hand signals, but so does anyone who's studied enough military procedure: it's readable.
What the Guests are trying to do isn't just escape: it's 'find an escape which wasn't already planned for'. I doubt they're the first people to stay at Village 3.0: some of these anti-escape responses and measures are logical thought (which would include stopping a dig-out -- Great Escape, anyone?), but a few were probably developed after seeing other people trying to get away. Effectively, they're stuck in a battle-tested program trying to find the last crashworthy loophole in the code -- and, should they locate one, to use it before the whole thing can be rewritten on them.
That last has its own problems. We already know the Sponsors (my name for their captors, drawn purely out of the air) can get people in and out pretty quickly. I wouldn't place bets against shock-and-awe troops being bunkered under the buildings, waiting outside the pain wall -- anywhere they could swarm in and stop things quickly. I also think that's a last resort: mental warfare first, hand-to-hand last. But there's got to be a command center fairly close by -- and the Guests may eventually force it to send a physical response.
Oh, and Janet? As many times as the plot requires.