1. That's what the board says, I'd tend to agree with it and I'm pretty sure many others also would...
  2. Everyone is limited on time. However, AFAIK you don't have any big projects under development ATM, do you?
  3. There is already some minimalistic animation when hiding the "ear" (smooth move to the center of the main window then hide) but it can be improved (for example gradual hiding using QWidget::setMask(). The only problem here is that I don't know how to generate a proper mask... (which value implies transparency and what's the best way to generate such a dynamic mask...)