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You don't have to do anything. Akeeba Backup is primarily designed as a means to transfer site. The "backup" part is just a subcase of site transfer where the source and target server are the same. As a result the integrated restoration script (Akeeba Backup Installer) is smart enough to understand when you are restoring to a different location than the one you backed up from and propose you to blank out the database details, asking you to enter your new database connection information. Simple :)

No, the password is contained in plaintext in two places:
- The backed up configuration.php file
- The installation/sql/databases.ini file generated inside the archive
I would recommend adding a new user to your development database, change configuration.php to use this new user and then back up your site. After the backup is complete you can revert to your old user and remove this temporary database user.

I will have to think about adding such a feature. It would cause two major issues:
1. The configuration.php not being present you lose more than just your database connection information. Editing the configuration.php on the fly (while backing it up) is not possible without tying up Akeeba Backup to specific versions of Joomla!. This is not desirable as it will make it extremely hard to provide a consistently functional component for different Joomla! versions.
2. The databases.ini file is used as a means to convey the number and names of backed up databases to the restoration script. Perhaps we blank out the username and password, but that's all we could do.

You can, however, take a backup and extract it locally. Then edit the configuration.php and installation/sql/databases.ini files manually. ZIP the results in a standard ZIP archive with normal compression (don't use any fancy compression options). Using your operating system's built-in folder compression works best! The resulting ZIP archive should be extractable by Kickstart, just like a regular ZIP-format archive file generated by Akeeba Backup.

There is a specific development roadmap, but maybe I can sneak this feature in. I'm adding a to-do list item and I can tentatively promise to include it in the next or second next version of Akeeba Backup.

The way this feature will most likely work is this: When enabled, the databases.ini file will not contain the connection username and password. You will have to exclude the configuration.php file manually, using the Files and Directories Exclusion. That is, unless I implement a feature in Akeeba Engine which allows dynamic editing of files while they are being backed up. I am not sure I want to implement that kind of feature due to performance concerns (it would add a lot of overhead to the backup process).