2. 250K+ for 4 people will give them the opportunity to focus and advance fast without financial side effects.
3. Since when the J. Fried camp is so worried about specs? They want to build a tool to scrape the data, store it local and make it avail. via standard protocol. Nothing to invent, all the tools are in place, but a lot of hard work on the boring integration/config details and testing.
And to the point again: if such thing work I guess it will not be that hard to include a tasks and project management layer that will hurt Basecamp.