@CoinDesk says part of the aim is to combat ASIC?

That's what Litecoin tried to do. Once the value went up, vultures moved in to develop ASIC-Scrypt hardware, forcing people to accept them and start pre-ordering.

1. Why won't that happen again with ethererum? Are you offering a centralised or hosted mining?
2. Will there be any need and would you change any code if someone figures out how to develop ASIC? - something the Litecoin developers seem to want to avoid despite the community showing a two-thirds informal vote for a coding change to avoid ASIC.