Also I will add my tuppence: Data storage is a REALLY bad idea, unless you have a method of removing it through some kind of voting mechanism, or it's personal and securely encrypted. To allow unencrypted data in the blockchain is incredibly spammy - the BTC blockchain is already 18GB. Imagine that if there'd been data compressed in it. Perhaps if you ran a second distributed data store or something, and THAT was encrypted, with an opt-out on storing it for people with legal concerns... Although that has its own problems.
The legal ramifications if some sicko spams your blockchain with images of child porn could be huge....
tl;dr: I think storing data in the blockchain is a bad idea.
1. Unfortunately miners can place any sorts of data into the block chain. Satoshi added "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." Many following blocks have non-blockchain specific data in the merkle root tree.
http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html2. Ideally in a future version, miners can reject blocks manually. The long average mining time should be sufficient time for people to react without an excess of wasted blocks. Also known as discouraged blocks.
And I like the honesty - "heat death of the universe" :-P I feel like some projects are gonna take that long myself sometimes.
I'll be honest, I have no idea, and it'll take me a while to familiarize myself with the code in order for me to even begin modifying it.
And I doubt there are any programmers interested in cryptocoin development that isn't a pump and dump scheme. If they were truly interested in cryptocoin adoption, then they'd figure out a way to reduce hoarding and induce price stability. Most people aren't young enough to appreciate the possibility of losing half or more of your savings (well, I'm not that old either, but you get my point).