Found Pieter and his books a couple years ago and it make a big impact. The Collective Code Construction Contract is a brilliant piece of community engineering and should be adopted/adapted by every FOSS project on the planet. We can accomplish so much more together if we have C4 and similar methods of coordination. Next time you hear of a burnt-out maintainer, have them read https://rfc.zeromq.org/spec/42/
The problem with chat is the interruptive, thoughtless nature of it. In a large organization, you want durability that you won't get from chat.
Internal Q&A, forums, and email all work because you can have long-form conversations on them but an important consideration is discoverability. If a new user wants to find out why X is true for some service, they'd better be able to do that without interrupting someone else.
It's a good question. I haven't seen them in the Counterparty forums or Bitcointalk thread. I own some XCP but no MC. My reasoning is because XCP had proof of burn and has seen steady dev progress. Sometimes, millions in funding cause more problems for a project than it solves.
If you think the point of Bitcoin/Litecoin is being able to transact with it quickly and easily over eBay, you might want to look into the other things you can do with these new currencies.
You should really look into the history of altcoins because I'm positive one with a constant mining release schedule has been done. One issue with some of them has been premining but if it wasn't premined and was reasonably well-known at launch it probably stands as a good test of whether something like it will ever work. Funnily enough the altcoin that has done the best has changed very few parameters.
This is kind of like saying you won't invest in Facebook or Google or Apple until their price stabilizes. Either it's worth it to you or it's not. Stability is overrated in a world where pricing updates can be automated. If you're concerned about exchange rate risk, what you do is keep your funds in a more stable asset (like USD) but ready to be converted. Put a small amount of USD in an exchange and you'll be able to buy when you want to without this exchange rate risk.
Spending a Bitcoin doesn't mean you have a net decrease in the number you have. You could and probably should keep a spending balance in USD at an exchange and buy specifically to make purchases. This is actually more beneficial to the Bitcoin community since it shields it from being overly damaged by Bitcoin price decreases. I spend and accept bitcoins because it's a very easy way to transfer value.
Storing BTC balances as floats is something a few services have done in the past so it makes sense to ask/bring up. Since BTC have 8 decimal precision, rounding can become noticeable very quickly even in addition and subtraction even though in real, today's value, it's not such a big deal.