Trust me, the price will *not* suffer. Pay attention to the news that will be released in the coming week and you'll see why;) We'll launch the official blog and forum of IOTA in the coming week with a lot of interesting news, so don't worry about price or development taking a blow. It's hard to communicate, but the GUI is just that; GUI, it has nothing to do with IOTA as a technology.
I think it would be a great idea to bring someone on board that can maintain/update the UI after it's been finished by the design firm. That way you don't have to rely on a 3rd party to fix small bugs, etc.. I'm sure you've already thought about that. Also, in terms of use cases, should we be thinking of projects that the Iota team can develop or more broad range use cases that involve corporations, etc? I have some ideas for simple web bases use cases.