Evan Carew wrote:
Smitty,

Ideally, I would like to treat this as a community project where the
community contributes the expertise & labor and benefits from the data.


It comes down to "the tragedy of the commons". You are asking people
to privatize the costs and commonize the profits, the reverse from
human nature and good business.


The biggest problem in sport aviation is the low volume involved. If
you get the volume up the costs will come down a great deal.

Overseas production could offset this somewhat. However, getting
people to build aircraft in most countries, even on an experimental kit
basis, is tough. The list of countries that have job shops you can send
a print to, notated in the English language and dimensioned in US
units, and have a hope in hell of getting a part back more than very
vaguely resembling the print, at total costs significantly cheaper than
in the US, is quite small.