Great questions !

1. I am in favor of reducing the power down time, I would even be in favor of a system where you can set the time you want to power up your hive, like all your power ups are powered for 8 weeks so you access witness & proposals voting, anything less you only get access to voting & curation rewards, which would solve one of the biggest argument against reducing the power down aka the exchanges powering up and wrecking havok as we've seen on EOS.

2. I pretty much don't see anything preventing it from happening apart from a front end, in fact, my latest development for core hive, recurrent transfers, is there to support these kinds of use cases. So yeah definitely could happen, It's just a matter of someone picking the project up.