There have been rumors of its' development, just wondering if there are any rumors as to when we might see it?
There has been no official word mentioned anywhere about this. All you've read is speculation from other users (and it's mostly based on hope rather than anything substantiated by fact). So unless everyone else knows something I don't, I wouldn't hold my breath until you see something official with respect to development.
I would just like to strip out the menus and extras so they do not take up as much room on my hard drives.
Is Hd DVD the 50 or 20 gig discs, my only question is what are we going to be compressing them to a dual layer disc or would it have to also be a hd dvd blank disc seeing as how expensive these things seem to cost.
Yes. The amount of compression required to fit on even a dvd+R DL wouldn't be, in my opinion, worth it.