QQQ gets the leverage from, among other things, swap agreements and futures. I don’t think what you have could be reasonably considered “pseudo-QQQ”. It’s like copying a cake recipe, but leaving out the flour and eggs because they are too expensive.
I am in the "false confidence" stage of Dunning Kruger Syndrome for finance stuff, so I personally would do swap agreements, but I'm not an average case.
Still, as you said, just mimicking regular QQQ is achievable.
You also don’t need AI to do this. Before AI, the main barrier to direct indexing was the amount of capital you need. That is still true.