We would like to use this, but can't because the rules are too restrictive.If a user is asked about what they want info about, they should not be forced to say "tell me about Point Defiance Zoo". They should be able to say "Point Defiance Zoo" with no leading phrase. Instead of forcing us to use a leading or trailing phrase, please allow the use of just {query} (without 'search for...' or other text around it as in the example below:
{

    "name": "SearchIntent",

    "samples": [

      "search for {Query}",

      "find out {Query}",

      "search for {Query} near me"

    ],

    "slots": [

      {

        "name": "Query",

        "type": "AMAZON.SearchQuery"

      }

    ]

  }

The audio player interface allows playing from a streaming service - e.g. a radio station
This is a continuous stream that could run for many hours - but the skill is only given the opportunity to provide song information at the start.
It could respond to user requests - such as "What song is this?" (which is OK) but, primarily for devices with screens, it would be useful for the skill to be able to provide title/subtitle/graphics as the songs change within the continuous stream.

This could be done by having the Skill start the audio stream with a duration parameter which would result in a callback when it is about to be reached - similar to the PlaybackNearlyFinished request.
The Skill could then send new metadata (potentially with an offset to say display in X seconds) and with a new duration parameter.

An alternative approach that could work without any skill being developed at all ...
If the player automatically took the metadata from an ICY stream (as provided by Shoutcast / Icecast servers) then it would be a good alternative - especially if the skill to parse a regex that should be used to parse the ICY title - with a default that would handle "artist name - song title" which is what many internet radio stations use (and StreamURL for the image).
For example ...
Playing http://www.dandelionradio.com/DandelionRadio.pls.

Name : Dandelion Radio
Genre : Alternative
Website: http://www.dandelionradio.com
Public : yes
Bitrate: 128kbit/s
ICY Info: StreamTitle='Rocker: D. A. Stern - Isn't It Obvious?';StreamUrl='http://www.dandelionradio.com/images/drlogosq-black.jpg';

Right now a routine is triggered by a voice command or specific time. However, some routines are to be triggered by voice and time.

For example:
Alexa, good night. Will turn of the lights, etc.
But you want this routine to run at certain time, say 22:00, in case you forgot or because you don’t want to say even the command, etc.
Currently to achieve this you would have to recreate the entire skill by hand, as were is no copy function either, but this time change the trigger. This is extremely annoying and worsens as the actions in the routine increase in count.

Alternatively, a solution to this problem would be to be able to run routines from inside other routines, so that the setup for the second routine, as stated before, would be much quicker and easier.

Currently all skills must run through Amazon’s Natural Language Understanding and provide a language model to Alexa. While this is helpful for getting started, many more advanced features for Language Processing and response building benefit heavily from having the user’s speech accessible to perform more complex operations like sentiment analysis, conversation reconstruction or custom natural language processing through models on other services. This allows developers to deliver a richer experience to users through the additional processing it makes possible.
For my use case in specifically it would be acceptable to have an option in the console to disable the language model and only receive the speech transcript in requests, and I think there are other developers who would benefit from this as well. Currently to get access to an approximation of the raw speech requires a basically empty language model, which works but suffers in performance.

Allow the Endpoints to be changed for a Live skill WITHOUT submitting for re-certification.

In the new Developer Console for a Live (already published) skill, you can see the endpoint ARNs in textboxes which would indicate that they are editable, but the Save Endpoints button is disabled.

The following scenarios outline why the endpoints should be editable. The timing and reasons for changing the endpoints shows that they should be done without triggering a re-certification.

Scenario 1
The skill's lambda function is hosted in a region that goes down. With a quick change of the ARNs, your skill will be Live again hosted from a different region. No re-certification needed. No changes were made to the skill and the timeliness of getting your skill active again to support users does not fit the timeline for re-certification.

Scenario 2
You have already certified and published a skill and you discover a bug that is crashing your lambda. No utterances have changed, no responses have changed, but you want to quickly deploy a hotfix to the lambda function only. No re-certification needed. No changes were made to the skill features and the timeliness of getting your skill active again to support users does not fit the timeline for re-certification.

Scenario 3
You are using versioning and aliasing of Lambda functions. You have two aliases: beta & prod. The first time you certified/published your skill, you used the 'prod' alias suffixed to the ARN. Weeks later, it is time to make changes to the interaction model and lambda code. You version and then alias the most recent changes to you lambda with the 'beta' alias. The 'In Development' version of your skill is pointing to the beta ARN. You go ahead and publish the skill and after certification it is the version that has the 'Live' status. But the ARN is pointing to the beta alias. At this point the lambda code is correct, but the alias is wrong. In the Lambda console, you assign the 'prod' alias to the latest version and in the Developer Console, change the ARN to the 'prod' aliased version. Now the beta alias is ready to be used for the next set of changes. The current two-phase (In Development => Live) deployment of skills does not function well with the versioning and aliasing of lambda functions unless you are able to change the ARNs for a Live skill. The fact that the reason for changing the ARN is because of certification it would be skill to require re-certification just for changing the alias portion of the ARN.

If there are concerns about bait-n-switch (where a skill is certified and then the code is swapped out for other code) then changing the endpoints could put this skill on a re-evaluation list to be checked out and removed if needed.

Simple voice control of DIY devices could be achieved if the Routines section of the Alexa App had an option to do an HTTP POST.

eg/ I have a home-made lamp (based on an ESP8266) which I currently control using a custom skill that drops the JSON payload to a Linux server which interprets it then does a HTTP POST to the lamp's URL with the required mode as a parameter. ("mode=candles"/"mode=off"/"mode=purple"...etc)

I could (and other hobbiests and educators could) much more easily have implemented this with an Alexa Routine identified by "make it candle time" with a line in the routine which would hike the command over to the lamp's URL without the need for the custom skill or my local server.

The POST option would need to accept a HOST:PORT combination in order to perform appropriate routing to devices once it hits someone's router.

This would open up opportunities for people to implement voice control of custom devices without the need to create a skill, have their own server or implement forwarding in AWS.