I learned more from your comprehensive reply than I have in three days of scouring the net. I'll keep looking through this forum for more useful information.
Awesome

I have been answering the same questions for years, so I'm getting good at it

1. Is Bitminter going to introduce PPS mining (with subsequently high fees of course) in future? This will potentially help smaller miners with lower hashrates because they are getting confirmed payouts.
This is highly unlikely. PPS is extremely dangerous for a pool. It only takes a little bad luck and the pool is bankrupt. Most PPS pools already either went bankrupt or stopped offering PPS.
2. Is Bitminter going to add PPC (Peercoin) for merged SHA-256 mining in future? Because, NMC is currently dead now, considering its current price and overall trading volume w.r.t PPC. Also NMC has numerous issues with it's blockchain as discussed earlier and developers also abandoned it without fixing.
Peercoin does not support merged mining, so this is not possible.
3. In case of merged mining (whether NMC or PPC), will they automatically convert altcoin to BTC in future? Because, I guess many miners will not hoard altcoins that are highly volatile. In fact, they are just dumping them after mining. So the question.
This would be a possibility. My impression is that most people are just annoyed by the namecoins and want them removed. Autoselling might be one option.