Can I please get out of here?  My main area of interest is project development and there aren't a lot of topics in the newbie area related to that.

Have you tried contacting MagicalTux on IRC?  The channel is mtgox and it's on freenode.

http://irc.lc/freenode/mtgox/

People are going to keep trading it as a commodity for as long as doing so returns more value than spending it as a currency.  Even when there are many more goods and services available to spend Bitcoins on, it will often make more sense to purchase them using hard currency than to buy them with Bitcoins because of the potential for Bitcoins to be worth more a few hours or days later.

The US department of Justice recently took action against a number of overseas sites offering online poker and the third party payment processors who were transmitting payments to and from customer accounts.  While the US isn't the whole world, there are still a lot of legal issues to navigate when offering online gambling, no matter where it's based.  It's an industry which is already under significant scrutiny, so you need to be aware of the potential for serious legal consequences if you're not very careful about how you establish and maintain any such enterprise.

In the long term, the aim is for those who maintain the network to make money from confirming transactions rather from mining.  It's difficult to project now whether that will be profitable enough in the future for people to contribute their resources to that process or how high the fees will need to be in order for remaining part of the network to be attractive to current miners.

Who is your target audience?  I suspect that a lot of people are going to be more willing to play games which involve some degree of strategy, like poker and black jack, than games of pure chance. 

The online poker community has taken some serious hits recently so people are looking for new places to play and new ways to fund playing (there's actually a thread about Bitcoins on one of the bigger online poker forums).  On the other hand, the recent dramas in the online poker world mean that establishing trust is going to be a major issue for new providers, so you'd need to think about how you're going to do that.