It's only a proposal. You might draw some design ideas from here too. It's not my goal to create a new cryptocurrency whatever it is. If you (or probably, we as a community) can pull off a good enough implementation, there's really no reason for me to create my own. I'm just trying to initiate the discussion and development here, not to do all of it myself.

And to add something concerning the launch date, it needs to be set far away enough so that the project can gain as much publicity as it can. Although it would be more profitable for us miners when we could get a headstart, in order to the currency to succeed, we must get as much early adopters as possible. Bitcoin helps a lot in that, because there have been lots of people that have become familiar with the cryptocurrency concept and if we get a new blockchain rolling now, there will be much larger userbase ("wanna-be-rich-early-adopters") than there was when Bitcoin was launched. We definitely don't want majority of the coints to be held by minority of the users.