1) You're certainly right that banks have nothing to go on. My credit isn't amazing, but its certainly decent enough that I could probably manage a small loan from the banks on personal credit alone. It would provide a few months float money, at the least.
2) You've argued heavily before that there needs to be an element of becoming personally committed[1], providing motivation. Having a Personal Loan over your head is certainly one way to do that.
3) Are there other options? Raising Angel money would be more difficult for us that for some projects, because we're not as Sexy as we could be.. We sent in a yCombinator proposal that was very ambitious, but were rejected, so we scaled back to what we thought we could achieve on our own.
We're doing a pretty decent job on it, but its not going to be the next Google, or even the next Scribd. Most Angel Investors seem likely to want to back a sexier horse, so to speak.
We do have a dedicated group of users waiting to sign up for paid subscriptions, and we know we could hit profitability reasonably quickly, but how do we get from here to there?
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html