They plan on lightning integration next year which solves the threshold issue. Also they did say they will manually pay out small balances to those who look like they'll never make the threshold on a best effort basis.

The radically transparent piece... well... I'd like an answer on what parts of the code will be open sourced.

I think what they are referring to as radically transparent is the transaction template preview which you can see before the block is mined, not after like all other pools.

I don't think they're perfect yet but it's a step in the right direction.