That's literally the opposite of what I just said. Supposedly the big issue was getting translators to stick around. Skummy convinced him to go with machine translation for now, and with the examples shown a few days, the translation is looking better than Latecomer's translation.
Sidelined may have been a poor choice of words on my part, but it seems like it's no longer the main focus anymore.
1. They're currently independent of each other. You can carry over saves, but that's it. And you can skip weeks, if you want.
2. Yeah, the specials are standalone, and some have been implemented into the main game as flashbacks or dream sequences. As for what patches you need: For Week 1 you need "Week 1 - Final". For Week 2, you need "Day 8-14 - Final Release" and for Week 3, you need "Day 20+21 - Final".
3. There's no traditional walkthrough, but if Week 1 has Lain's mod, which will tell you what each choice leads to. Week 2 and Week 3 have something like that implemented by default.
Hope that helps