Hopefully they'll make the game more balanced and advanced. Bigger company means bigger updates, but the quality of these updates is questionable.
I don't trust microsoft to make it something better.

Pretty much that's growing up. Kids love the concept of minecraft with everything pixelated.
Alot of people cracked minecraft but pretty sure that's not 30% of the multiplayer community, 2.5billion is a good price if it stays populair.

Last update was around 5-6 days ago. The game is indeed losing players, but it still has a immense number to be considered dying. Mods are still being made excessively, popular modpacks are still being played and updated, forums are extremely active still. I doubt Minecraft will be a default windows game any time soon, if at all.

I'm betting that Windows is somehow going to manage to fuck this up and kill the game with either stupid updates or by doing something likewise stupid.
I honestly hope they don't, it's a fun game, it doesn't really have staying power because theres only so many times you can go into servers and build giant penises of obsidian but still, it's enjoyable and people are still buying it.

Although I really do doubt that the company was worth 2.5 billion. If you do the math, averaging the amount of money they made per copy of minecraft to about $34-$36(what with price changes from beta to alpha and release, console ports, the prices are all over the place), the game has sold about 54 million copies at last count (which is a month off, so it's obviously a bit higher, I used 56 million, seemed like a reasonable estimate.
That gives use about 1.9 billion dollars from minecraft. Obviously mojang in general has made sales from other merchandise, which means the number is a bit higher, maybe about $2.1 billion in total? Number is obviously off, because the price of minecraft has changed from alpha to beta to release and then console ports and whatnot, but it's just approximate. Could be higher, could be lower.
I obviously don't know the sales of other items that mojang has sold (like t-shirts and stuffed things) but I'm just guessing. Mojang pretty much doubled the profit they made from Minecraft in a second. My math is probably off by a lot, but still, it's somewhat closeish depending on how you look at it.

if you think there going to be any major game updates for minecraft - i can bet a pile of cookies, that there would not.

i still bet that this acquisition is going to be used as marketing tool to boost sales for windows / xbox

because honestly, nobody in MS gives a shit about this as a game, but it's popularity, wide spread and "safe for children" marketing bullshit.

I predict even further "dumbing down" of minecraft.

Is that even possible? The game has a seriously simple concept.

no longer needing to arrange items in a specific pattern to craft?

There already exists pattern-free recipies and in the xbox version it does it for you

Clearly microsoft will take it to the next level and remove the part of the game where you have to hit the blocks to break them.
Prepare for the next level of realistic pixelated sandbox survival games guys.
now with even less effort required.