Albion Online Dev Tracker

Yes there's an issue with chat atm that's why we are restarting the servers at around 18.22 UTC to fix this.
-Hellements

Once you purchased a private island with premium you will keep it even if you lose premium afterwards.

If you want to make mainly silver you should go for hearts and crests. The chests are worth it if you need the fame books that are in them. Doing dungeons will usually get you that fame quicker though.

Yes feel free to use alt characters if you want to specialize into a different direction. The main reasons to make alt characters are the additional learning points you can use in a different spec (that's what you want to do I guess) or using the crafting focus, which is limited by 10000 per day of premium.

I know UI suggestions have been requested a lot recently so I'll make sure to bump this to the devs again.
-Hellements

Due to the increased number of players, cluster queues in royals have become more common. Devs are aware of these issues where it's difficult to skip the cluster because of this "warmup time", they are looking into making it more reliable to skip clusters in these situations but don't know the final details yet and when this will be available.
-Hellements

You can still be attacked by other players but only if they are flagged for pvp. If you are not faction flagged you won't interact with other faction flagged players unless you enter a conditional flag zone (orange circle, can be found in world boss regions like camlann for example).