Heating things does let you dissolve more into it, but the ocean isn't near the maximum amount of salt that could be dissolved in it.

Well, you'd have month-long days. It wouldn't cause life to be on only one side of the planet though.

>You wouldn't have tides.

You'd still have solar tides, which are about 1/3 of our current tides.

The angle wouldn't be great for solar collection. You want to be at right angle to incoming sunlight, it drastically increases the amount of energy you collect.

Other people have given the answer for life in general, but the smallest vertebrate genomes come from pufferfish, which almost completely lack "Junk DNA". Some of the largest come from lungfish. In vertebrates, genome size isn't really associated much with complexity.

> I feel like smaller bubbles rise slower

This intuitively makes sense to me...buoyant forces of a bubble are related to volume, but the amount of water that has to move out of the way for the bubble to rise is related to cross sectional area. It takes force for water to move out of the way.... it's got inertia and viscosity after all (Hi Reynold's Number!) so bigger bubbles should rise faster.

I bet there's all sorts of neat bubble physics on exoplanets, given the variety of pressures, temperatures, gravities, and fluids present.