I've mentioned this for other projects, but why not do the work in the open too? Why not just make the code public as you work on it? It's hard to believe openness and transparency are the goal if there is none during development (even if the code is ugly and you have to turn away too-early assistance/suggestions). No invites, nothing hidden.

Also, wrt AGPL, as a contributor I would personally prefer a "commitment" the other direction. That I can contribute without putting restrictions on the recipient. I think in our current times, preventing commercial and closed source use has little value as people just go elsewhere. I don't want this to devolve into a pros/cons of copy-left discussion, but in general the fewer adoption restrictions the better I'd say for projects like these.

I will say I agree with almost all of your other goals (except some of the stack :-).