"Hot Potato" - cool analogy, I would suggest we wait until the stockpiled DAO SBD does not form part of the debt ratio calculation and then commit to sending to the DAO, my commitment currently remains to take a community poll when it is no longer needed, at that time the market could need something else, SBD could be high and needed to flood the market to peg it back down as an example.
We don't really know, I reckon once there is 10 000 STEEM circa $1000 then we can have a discussion in comment on a dedicated post, maybe 1K USD is small, perhaps should be 10K USD before it becomes a concern, it's all subjective I guess.