We haven't decided yet. The Republic will maybe be a quarter of the galaxy, including the Core. The Sith will have an even smaller territory, in the historical Sith region around Moraband.
We have no answer to that question at this time.
The flipside is that there are certain parts of the story that have to be driven by the factions, so even if you're having a wonderful time RPing your own storylines, the timeline itself - as a setting, as a conflict, etc - gets stagnant without the competitive edge, as @Jake rightly put it earlier.
As always, the role indie factions play is up to the successes and failures of each indie faction. We're not doing things much differently from an admin perspective in terms of how they're used.
Oh I understand that, I was pretty much reiterating what Weiss said here. While factional conflict is important, members don't have to sit around and twiddle their thumbs until it occurs. The site isn't a high school English class where you have to write about whatever topic the teacher assigns you, which is the mindset I saw much of when people were getting frustrated about the lack of activity.
The answer to that question is exactly the same as my last post.
We don't put end dates on timelines, so there's no way of knowing. For reference, this is how long previous timelines lasted:
