We should empower peer to peer HP lending and allow new projects to bootstrap their ideas.

I agree with both these ideas, in particular the latter. That's one of my two main focuses for Hive's future (the other is the reputation/rating app I want to design).

Reduce power down period to 10 weeks

I'm somewhat on the fence on reducing the powerdown time, although I don't see there be too much impact in changing powerdown time from the current 12 (13?) weeks to 10 weeks. A stronger impact (for good or ill) would be 4 weeks. My best guess (and it's purely a guess) is that neither of these changes will affect much, on their own. I suppose one argument for 10 weeks is that it would be easier to calculate your weekly payout. Right now I have to employ a calculate to do it :-)