It will be a monumental task putting this together therefore you should consider sending PMs to those you would like to see as part of the endeavour otherwise you will not know whether it is feasible to move forward. If there is consensus between the key personnel you would like to participate then it makes life easier when going forward. If there is little (or zero) consensus, I guess that would be the end of the project.
As always, things have to come down to the finances as well. As far as total (estimated) first year costs are concerned, what sort of numbers did you calculate?
I agree with you. Adding a responsive search to this forum would uncover a lot of past corruption (from the administration and their staff) so I doubt the whales here will spend a single satoshi making information more available. As a moderator told me a few years ago about working for Theymos - "Ignorance is bliss". But since I've started looking into this I've found much better ways than using a GPU for parsing LLMs. JJ has proven he is talented (and I'm hoping Ninja gets involved as well) so I think they will be able to run a small search on standard shared hosting. It may take them more resources to train the model, but once trained/indexed it can be run easily on free resources from cloud providers. These frameworks include a token purchase/use construct, so the developers can make their money back that way for people using the search for non-casual uses. In other words, this will be a project for the community, and not another tool under admin control.