Because.

Well, to figure that out, you need to go through the proper process. First, break it down. 'e' 'motion'. Two words. So, it refers to the motion of 'e'. Now, what is the motion of 'e'. Well, to draw motion, we draw something out, leave trails of it behind it (usually with trails smaller than the leading one). So eeeeee. Now, try reading that aloud. Now, try screaming it. That's right, eMotion is about falling!

eMotion is a media player. It uses MPlayer to play the videos, as we are not up to making an entire video rendering program. eMotion is only the front-end which calls MPlayer. The icons, dialog boxes, buttons, menus, all of those things are eMotion. The actual video playback, that's MPlayer. Well, actually, the dialog boxes, buttons, menus, and so-such are Qt. The icons, the way everything is arranged, and all the text, that's eMotion.

No, eMotion is in the Public Domain. It's what I like to call, really, really, really free software. Enjoy.

Changing the button appearances is really easy. Just change all the .png files in the source package and run 'make install'. If you want to go to the trouble, you can change the icons where they've already been installed to. (They're at '/usr/local/share/emotion/icons' by default)

MPlayer ONLY plays video. Technically, it has a GUI, and you may like it, but I've found it rather disappointing. MPlayer can be used, and very effectively, I might add, from command line. eMotion is for those people who don't like memorizing all the commands to call MPlayer from command line.

eMotion depends on MPlayer, but does not include it. You may need to download MPlayer and install that first.

Besides MPlayer, everything which eMotion depends on is fairly standard.

eMotion just increments number by number. Decimal increases in version numbering only have importance when they can reliably convey important changes. For example, increasing the primary number in a database might mean that it has incompatible file format changes, so the other numbers are needed for less significant changes. eMotion is a media player. What could we possibly denote with the different numbers and increases? Besides that, point releases are often for bug fixes. However, we make sure our releases are useable, and release often with the fixes in the next version. This seems to be a workable way of doing things.

Well screw you too.

The entire website is included in the installation tarball, so yes.

That's an answer that may change very shortly. At the time that eMotion was released, MPlayer was at 1.0pre1. Several patches in CVS help eMotion function better. If you can do so easily, or are having issues, try getting MPlayer from CVS. However, there should be no major errors if you use MPlayer 1.0pre1. For that matter, MPlayer 9.2 seems to function properly.
When MPlayer 1.0 is released, definitely use it.
If you do decide to get MPlayer from CVS, note that you need to not only get the MPlayer CVS, but to also get the ffmpeg CVS, as MPlayer CVS does not include libavcodec (all the release tarballs do).