Although I haven't yet published my thoughts on the new Guild Wars 2 Spring Update, I have to say it looks and sounds awesome. The patch notes are absolutely enormous and bring with them a whole host of changes. Mike O'Brien who is now leading development has posted a fairly good overview of what the patch encompasses. There's also a roundup of most of the new features here. If you're going to read the patch notes (here) just be sure to have a drink ready - they're absolutely enormous. 

As for the Ask Me Anything, Dulfy has put together a TL:DR that everyone should take a look at. Stay tuned for my impressions of the update shortly.

Hopefully I have caught all the responses but here is a summary of the current AMA. Some are paraphrased by me, others are directly copy/pasted.

Update Schedule

• Next quarterly update will be focused on new content. There will be more Living World, less rework of existing features. Maybe we'll bundle Living World and the quarterly update. To be determined.
• As to legendaries, we can't sustainably develop them in the form we had been, so they remain a question mark. Let's get some Living World under our belt, then see what makes sense.

WvW

• Will not release world pairings in advance to reduce gaming the system.
• Language/National worlds will only be paired with other worlds of the same language.
• World Linking is not a complete fix for population imbalances but we felt it was a necessary step.
• We can link many worlds together, though in this Beta worlds will only have a single partner (if they are linked at all). Many high ranking worlds in EU will not be linked with another world.
• Worlds that are paired will have lower population caps.
• At most we'd re-link worlds every 3 months.
• World Linking decisions were primarily based on a combination of both Glicko rating and time-sliced activity levels.
• We plan to continue balancing for WvW, splitting skill damage between modes if necessary. This will likely be gradual though, tackling a few outlier skills at a time.
• EotM earns reward track points at a somewhat slower rate
• Superior Siege on Portable Provisioner- we will add this.
• Will discuss reenabling boon-striping in WvW again. Dev team raised concerns that boon strips become too weak relative to boon application, if you can easily cover your important boons with less important boons.
• We'll likely rotate worlds periodically, maybe once per quarter. In the short term this is a manual process, so we'd prefer to do this as few times as necessary, but in the long-term we'll likely want this to be an automated process.
• There will be a partial reset of Glicko (Deviation & Volatility) on Friday. We'll put a forum post explaining our reasoning, and listing world pairings on Friday as well.
• The process to update DBL was relatively quick (1-2 weeks), since we'd already been receiving feedback on the map for months. We focused on quick, low-risk, high-impact changes to the map.
• We were attempting to achieve rough parity with the rate that players can earn Reward Track progress in PvP. Once we are happy with WvW Reward Tracks and the feature leaves 'beta', we'll make a couple other changes like adding WvW Reward potions to the WvW daily chests.
• For now we plan to rotate the borderlands once each quarter.
• WvW Polling: We plan to poll about a variety of topics, but most importantly, we'll be asking what players would like us to work on next.
• WvW Participation points begin decaying after 10minutes of no participation gain.
• Cheap/free world transfers always end up upsetting population balance.
• Triumphant Hero's armor is not currently obtainable, but of course we'll want to add an acquisition method in the future.
• We decided not to do an ability point reset, since the new ability line is relatively cheap to acquire and reseting ability lines tends to annoy at least as many people as it helps
• We are aware that Fire keep is very difficult to siege with Trebuchets. A change that we were considering/still are considering would be to remove the entire sand dunes upper level above the keep, and move the shrine down. We opted not to, because it would be noticeably more work, and we weren't sure how players were going to react to the changes we had already made.

PvP

• With this balance patch we will continue to monitor the health of PvP balance. We will also keep making changes in the PvP build panel to add more build diversity through runes, sigils, and amulets. Including making changes to existing items to make them more competitve/viable options.
• We don't wish to touch the balance meta much, if at all, once a season has officially started unless there is a really glaring balance issue with a particular profession.
• Today's balance patch will make up the vast majority of balance changes prior to Season 3's start.

Fractals

• We actually want to make it easier to get Ascended gear from Fractals. There was a bug with HoT release that caused ascended drops to be lower than intended, which we have fixed and we buffed the drop rate again this patch.
• Ascended drops were actually increased significantly in the 26-50 range, and while they're slightly lower in the 51-75 range, the addition of the 76-100 tier means the overall chance of getting Ascended from your dailies is a lot better!
• We are looking into moving further away from pure RNG as a reward system, and it's possible that fractal tonics could play a part in that.
• We wanted the rewards for doing the highest tier fractals to feel great, that way players have incentive to actually push those scales! We do drop a lot of ascended mats in the master tier now, which should help with crafting ascended for alts
• More fractal instability revamps in the future
• No more plans for fractal leaderboards
• New fractal scheduled to be released this year. Fractal rotation will change once new fractals are added.
• By requiring a certain amount of AR, players have a tangible, quantifiable goal they can work towards when looking to ascend to higher scales.We don't have any plans to remove it, but we do want to streamline the acquisition of Ascended and Infusions to make gearing up more straightforward and palatable.
• Daily recommended fractals should still encourage expert players to run with new players.
• It is pseudo-intended pieces with less stats(gloves/boots/shoulders) to be more common than the ones with the most stats(coats/leggings) but the rates were skewed further than they should be. As a result we brought them closer together this patch.

Raids/DPS Testing

• Too many options for food/utility in the DPS testing area so we moved it to the backlog and will review it.
• Can’t comment on next raid wing yet.
• The DPS golem was more a matter of opportunity and timing than it was design-philosophy shift.
• Ranger pets not getting buffs inside the DPS testing area is a bug. No eta yet on fix.
• We focused primarily on offense this time around, so we'll be sure to evaluate the test lab for defense in the future.
• We are actively discussing an alternative mode for raids (easy / hard), but we have not finished our investigations or finalized any decisions.

Class Balance

• Development of build templates will occur in WvW first and if it goes well sPvP will get it too.
• The fact multiple necromancers using deathly chill stomped on each others damage was something we wanted to fix.This change allows the reaper to apply attrition damage to enemies through chill. The reason it's bleed and not something like poison is that this trait is intended to be a DPS add instead of another debilitating effect.
• Slick Shoes was causing issues in both PvE and PvP in cirumventing breakbars and stability.
• Aware of Revenant sword scaling issues and sword #2 skill hitting random targets. On radar to fix. Would also like to make more legends useable underwater in the future.

Misc

• No plan to sell Level 80 boost in the gemstore
• No raiding is required to make the new legendary shortbow
• Didn’t increase crystalline ore drop rate in DS but we added more Nox Pods and increase the drop rate of Machetes.
• Allowing the option of moving shared inventory slots around is a lot of work. We can look at keep shared inventory slots separate even in hide bags mode which can be done in a shorter timeframe.
• Talked about having a guild tab in the LFG system using squads for guild recruitment but the system doesn’t lend itself well to that case.
• No way to add clothing/leather nodes like wood/ore but we are looking at adding direct methods to acquire them like the map reward changes we did a while back.
• These days we have teams that "own" various areas of the game and have a lot of autonomy over developing those areas, so we're addressing QoL issues with the teams.
• Fixing the Mac Client for GW2 is a big project.
• The level-80 boost item can't be moved out of the shared inventory slot until it's been used
• Ad Infinitum is more of a prestige item and that is why it costs similar to a legendary weapon. All legendaries are supposed to be in the same price range. The intent was that a weapon, a backpiece, or a set of armor would all cost a similar amount. You can't get just a single piece of legendary armor, so saying it's cheaper is a bit of a misnomer.
• Decorations are very different from normal items and don't support being purchased in bulk at this time.
• Elite specs are post-level 80 content, so they are something you're going to need to unlock after consuming the boost
• Inventory resizing bug has been a notoriously difficult to fix bug. It's inconsistent. If anyone is able to find a series of actions that can cause it relatively consistently that could help a lot if posted to the forums or Reddit.
• Daily completion now giving 2g - We felt we had some room for increasing player income without risking major problems but we will continue to monitor the situation. Most wealth in the game is generated by people who are very proficient at generating wealth. They can bid a lot for what they want, because they have a lot of gold, and that process drives inflation. Meanwhile the broader player base is just getting by. So we keep a close eye on how much gold can be generated from extreme farming, but at the same time try to provide a decent income to normal players.
• In Dragon Stand, both the encounter in the open world and the battle inside the dream are supposed to be taking place at roughly the same time.The main battle is a distraction so a smaller force can slip in and try to kill the beast from the inside. It is generally believed that just killing the Mouth of Mordremoth won't be enough as it keeps growing new mouths to replace the lost one.
• Unlikely to add black lion chest skins to dungeons/fractal rewards. Want keep rewards unique to each aspect of the game.
• They are not sure where the Revenant beta weapon skins went.