How much knowledge would an outsider need to integrate huc and chi, or does the fact of two blockchains mean they have to be separate projects?
I think they have to be separate projects. Complete integration in the sense that the old Huntercoin blockchain would cease to exist is not possible. (and not desirable)
Everything in the Huntercoin community moves slowly, though, so I think it possible some competitor will arise before MM's plan, Chimaera, or an HUC fork attempt are able to come to fruition.
If a new huntercoin-ish game is made for Chimaera, then I guess it will not come out of nowhere but all beta versions up to a point will use the Huntercoin code base. When it's done, Huntercoin would have something almost ready to apply as hardfork, in whole or in part, assuming the community can achieve consensus.
A competitor that doesn't use the "play a game on our server, get some token" model would be interesting (to see how they deal with the bot+farming problem)
Arbitrarily making the snapshot cutoff 10,000 leaves out a lot of small people who have been the core of huntercoin. 
