What daemon features are you most excited about?
There are too many to go over, so I'll just pick one: The macaroon "bakery." LND provides you with auth tokens that have different levels of access called macaroons. It works similarly to oauth, giving external applications limited functionality. That's how TipHub is able to generate invoices for your node, without having access to do things such as make payments from your node, keeping your funds secure. The idea of the macaroon bakery would be a programmatic way of generating these macaroons. So one cool example of how this could work in the future is that you generate a macaroon that is only allowed to send a limited number of satoshis per month. Provide that macaroon to an external service, and now they can pull a monthly subscription directly from your node, that you can revoke at any time.
What projects are you most excited about this next year?
Lightning is moving so fast, it's hard to see what's coming beyond a few weeks. But stabilizing mainnet neutrino nodes to allow for easier setup is going to make Lightning absolutely explode, so I'm excited to onboard all of those new users. Likewise, so far most of what we've seen with Lightning have been built by solo enthusiasts, so I'm looking forward to what larger teams with will be able to put together once there's a much larger audience to attract them to building on Lightning. And hopefully, more hackathons like the Boltathon!