We will always do our best to make sure that no one single company controls Rust, but we do also want Rust to be useful to industry, and so we do want to listen to our users, no matter where they come from.
So it would not be individuals but a team with some high-level goals they plan to work on for the next year.
I have no idea how many people would fund a project like this but it would be a fast and low cost experiment to find that out.
I would not position this as "the people vs. the industry", it would be just an additional option to move Rust forward.
So I guess crowdfunded project idea is not bad at all. I mean there probably some rewards tier to have some tokens or souvenier