Regarding the schedule, and the request to plan for a 9-12 month Dev Fund discussion:
The Network Upgrade pipeline is a generic timeline for all consensus rule updates, based on lessons learned the hard way. It reflects the experience with the Overwinter network upgrade, and a severe blowback that ECC got from the community due to a more aggressive timeline. Loud voices from the ecosystem said they needed more lead time for testing, deploying, etc., and the NU pipeline reflects that learning.
Moreover, in the case of the dev fund NU, several people said that the only reason they are OK with “creating a new tax on the miners” is that the NU pipeline gives miners enough time to change their purchasing/investment decisions, and for their current equipment to mostly depreciate. So the long lead time is needed for this reason too.
I guess it can be pushed a bit, but deciding the Dev Fund “9-12 months” from now will go against all of those strong community requests.
(This is my personal opinion, not that of ECC or Zfnd.)