It might be an interesting experiment for the ex-Mozilla rust team to launch a kickstarter (or similar) project to get them funded for one year.

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.