Now is the chance to make an account and ask him.
Some of his answers are already up:
How long does it take to create a project like Lighthouse, from the idea to the product? And how many people are needed?
Great question! It took me about 8-9 months of full time work to get Lighthouse to beta, working on my own.
But this comes with several caveats. One is that I was working on other things during this time as well, like HD wallets. Another is that a big chunk of the Lighthouse code is actually the bitcoinj library, which I had been developing with many other people for years by that point. So I had a great understanding of the tools I was working with. If someone wanted to build an app like Lighthouse from scratch, it'd take them longer as they'd have to get up to speed, even if they used the same tools and frameworks I did.
That said, what I've seen is that most developers don't want to build downloadable P2P apps like Lighthouse or the original Bitcoin. They mostly want to make web apps. Once I launched Lighthouse, a couple of devs came along and built lightlist.io which is a web based version of Lighthouse, albeit with fewer features. It took them much less than 8 months, though partly that's because they were just reimplementing the Lighthouse design rather than doing something new, and because a more centralised solution is often easier to put together than something P2P.
Do you thing the difficulties of the blocksize debate will result in a more effective decision making process for future Bitcoin development and if so any thoughts on how that might work?
The only decision making process that should really matter is end users and miners picking what software to run. At the moment this mechanism has broken down completely due to a combination of censorship/DoS attacks and general propaganda of the form "if you run something other than Core the sky will fall". So the decision (non) making process used by Core has come under a lot of scrutiny because at the moment Bitcoin is a centralised system run by just one or two people (count differs depending on how you view things).
I don't know if Bitcoin will eventually recover its decentralisation. For that to happen users must feel empowered, and must learn to distrust even those who claim to be unbiased experts (including me). Instead they must learn to pick the software they use based on its merits rather than what the people writing it choose to say, and be willing to switch at any point if the software they use stops delivering.
One possible disadvantage is that faster confirmations may mean higher orphan rate ... do you think it is an impossible idea to make Bitcoin block confirmation times faster than 10 minutes to increase the scalability of Bitcoin?
and many many more answers at:
https://forum.bitcoin.com/ama-ask-me-anything/i-m-mike-hearn-creator-of-lighthouse-bitcoinj-and-bitcoin-xt-ask-me-anything-t2207.html