Don't worry about the 999 days. After 8.8 days, you'll qualify to compete with against others to win stakes. However, with 8500 HYP, you'd have to be very lucky. To give it a fair shot, I'd say a minimum of 100k and 6 to 12 months.

Because current difficulty is 395+

I have a 42k block that has an age of 14 days... so... huge difficulty = long time to stake... You need coins to make coins at this difficulty... think btc mining, but needing a lot of blocks (some large, some small) to give you enough weight overall in the wallet to get a block every now and then...

At least this is how I see it.  I could be wrong?