Ah, blitzes. I have written at length about blitzes in their heyday before: refer to the State of the Blitz for how they worked in 2018. Little has fundamentally changed. I’ll address your questions individually.
No. Blitzes are not scheduled. They happen when they happen, though generally people discuss these a few days in advance to make sure it would go at least somewhat smoothly.
No. Blitzes are somewhat of an old model, deriving from 2017’s Void’s Blitzarre Adventure. The original was headed by Circles, then a prolific assembly hacker (aka wizard) and now a discord admin. As a rule of thumb, tenure is required: nobody is going to join a new user advertising a blitz.
No. Development is not linear. The typical blitz workflow involves the blitz leader creating a spreadsheet to detail all the hack’s progress. Individual users claim individual chapters. There is nothing stopping someone from claiming the final chapter and creating it first.
Blitzes must be done in buildfiles for them to work properly. Due to the nature of many people working on chapters at once, Builder cannot be used. This has not stopped attempts at blitzing with Builder: they invariably end in tears.
As the name implies, blitzes are intended to be rapid, though they have a tendency to overrun their deadlines. Sometimes their leaders disappear midway through development. Blitzes do not equal community projects: Ternon was anything but a blitz.
That’s about everything. I’ve been in blitzes from the beginning, so feel free to ask questions on anything unclear.
Maybe we’ll finish VBA2 some day…