My not-so-hidden ulterior motive is to explore whether there's a way someone like me could get funding for anything, my impression is that I couldn't in the current environment.

I’d recommend speaking to steemchiller to see what appetite there is for your idea. If you have his trust and support, many of the big accounts will follow.

I think I understand the concept more now - it’s less from a developer/marketing perspective but more from a “prominent author” perspective. Where Steemit’s essentially contracting somebody they want to acquire with an up-front payment that is slowly recouped. Hence your reference to the book/music publishing industry.

This part is intrinsic to the DAO proposal model. The intention was to see if this was less 'risky' to the platform than the standard way of running a DAO proposal.

I’d be inclined to say it’s more risky since the money’s already gone. Using my proposal as an example, if I down tools / leave the platform, the DAO can stop payments whereas if Steemit was recouping the same figure from author rewards, it would never retrieve them. If I stayed and had repaid my debt, the platform would have to keep taking a cut to make their risk / change of approach worthwhile… much like a publisher owns the rights to a novel / album and pays the author / artist royalties. Then you could argue that the author would be better of reinventing themselves with a different username. I’m confusing myself now but hopefully my thoughts make sense.