I have some idea how it MIGHT work, but it would be a very boring solution involving 'learning' Stockfish's parameters and HOPING to find improvements to something like integrating time management and search/pruning into it.

I wouldn't bet on it though. SMP is notoriously hard to work with alpha-beta search and there are a lot of clever tricks (which is probably still not perfect). Maybe with ASICs, you could make it stronger, but then it wouldn't be as fair a comparison.