No one will choose it as their Ph.D project, the project is so massive in scale that it will take 10 years for a relatively talented postgraduate to lay down all the foundations.
It's not too big for an academic project, as in a project driven by a group of students, professors and researchers. It would be a particularly remarkable one.
By the end of the project some of the students involved could have obtained a PhD degree for the work they have done.
Just not the one single paper he published in the beginning. That said, John Nash's 28-page thesis on equilibriums of games was already enough for his PhD degree...
A masters by the way is dead easy. Even at the highest standards you just have to do grunt work for the professor, some semi-original research over a few semesters, and pass all courses.