Something i just thought of with the female doctor issue.
First, i am against the doctor being female, not for sexist reasons but because the doctor has always been established as a male. That's who the character is. Never once, in any regeneration, has the doctor said "am i a man or a woman?". It's never come up before until recently. This change is clearly a product of our time and not in a good way.
That being said, one way they could have brought on a female doctor and done some damage control would have been to establish that, when the doctor was given his additional regenerations, because they weren't originally his own, they carried some aberrant DNA which could result in unpredictable effects. This would explain the presence of a female doctor while still maintaining the Doctor's innate "maleness".
A big concern i have is that every episode is going to be about how the doctor is female - in the same way that, when Ellen came out of the closet, almost every episode after that was about homosexuality and lesbianism.