I work at Namebase.The other comments address most of your questions, but just to add on: the 52 week rollout will help significantly with preventing squatters. Handshake has designed some other mechanisms that prevent squatting. The first is that the Alexa top 100k domains have been pre-registered (only facebook.com can register .facebook on Handshake). This ensures that existing domain stakeholders can transition to Handshake without worrying about their name being squatted on.

Second, Handshake is airdropping 70% of the mainnet coins to open-source developers. If you have over 15 followers on GitHub, you can claim around $400-800 of Handshake coins (HNS) with no strings attached. Not only will this give developers an incentive to check Handshake out, but also this ensures that the bidding power is spread out at launch. Without this mechanism, a whale could spend $10mm on HNS at launch and outbid everyone.