- Porting to QT5 and making a static build is not hard to do.
- Checkpoints need improvements current checkpoints are badly chosen. This would probably decrease wallet launch time.
- Staking can be perhaps made better with only one change. Combine/split stake could be changed to a larger number. That would reduce "dust" - very small stakes/mints.
None of those changes does not require a fork.
The big question is, who is going to put hes/her free hours in to it?


In future perspective, i would suggest porting mintcoin code to newer protocol. This means a lot of changes. Probably around 2 days work at least.