The questions that keep coming up

Nowhere. The mod is in alpha and there is no public build. Nothing on this site is a download page in disguise: what you see here is the work in progress, not the mod itself.

There is no date, and there won't be one until it is real. No phase starts before the previous one is verified working in game, so any date given now would be a guess about work nobody has attempted yet.

No. The mod never assumes the expansion is installed. Anything tied to Dogtown sits behind a check, so on the base game you get the mod without the Dogtown content, not an error.

It is written not to. It wraps vanilla methods instead of replacing them, which keeps the chain intact for every other mod hooking the same method. Replacing a method outright is the single most common cause of mod conflicts, and it is banned here without a written justification.

Yes, and that is a hard rule, not a hope. Every piece of state the mod saves has to survive the mod being removed without corrupting the save it was written into.

Something will, yes: that is a certainty with every patch, for every mod. The design goal is for it to degrade instead of crashing: the part that depended on what moved stops working, and the rest keeps running.

Same idea, none of the code. LSPDFR is a GTA mod under a licence that does not allow reuse, and it targets a different engine anyway. It was studied as prior art; nothing was copied from it.

Not yet. The plugin interface is specified and published, on purpose, before it is written, so anyone planning to build on it can argue with the design while it is still cheap to change.

redscript, against the game's own decompiled scripts. Every engine function the mod calls is checked in that dump first, because a plausible-looking function name that does not exist costs a game restart to find out.