Actually you want engineers with a balance if it's any sort of a team.  With full on cases they will only be effective with a strong manager who can command respect on a technical level.  There's an amusing article on medium from a few months back talking about an example of this; it was something like 'We fired out best programmer and it was the smartest thing I ever did'.

Semi design isn't my area of expertise.  But as an outsider I don't understand why it wouldn't be feasible to have the transistor level layout be done in a platform independent way.  The would then allow for design debug to be completed at a low cost node for less than $1 M, then you could focus on building at the expensive node with confidence there won't be a catastrophe.  If that approach is feasible I don't really see why the whole thing couldn't be done in an open source fashion.  An open sourced transistor layout for SHA-256 would seriously break open the whole competitive oligopoly that exists now.  There are plenty of folks with double digits millions from bitcoin at this point that would see the benefit, so fund raising should be feasible.

I don't think there's much promise in pursuing other algorithms.  Basically ether's algo is the only one without existing silicon and a chance to survive long term.  I guarantee you there are people working on it already.