Insights in the post are incredible. Even though the details make the Indie way look a bit risky, the adventure part seems quite tempting. Wish you best of luck and thank you for sharing :)
I agree that the instinct of an employer is to hire employee for the lowest rate possible. But given a choice to hire between local employee and a remote employee who are negotiating for the same salary and possess the same level of skills, won't the company hire the remote one as the CTC involved will be less? So if the company's expenses are already going down by hiring a remote employee, they shouldn't make the cost of living of remote employee's area an issue.
I wrote a program that parses all files in the codebase (I mainly work with Objective-C frameworks and libraries), and forms a graph using all the imported 'header files' in each file. Then when I need to fix a bug or implement an API, I input the base-file name and the program spits-out all the header dependancies of the base-file in a tree format. This way I am able to limit the area of the codebase I need to focus on to solve the issue at hand. I keep on focusing on these small areas of codebase one after another and get familiarized with it pretty quickly.
That might sound like a convincing argument while a negotiation, but IMHO, remote or not, salaries should be negotiated based on skills of the worker and not the cost of living of his/her location. Ultimately, you get what you negotiate for.
"researchers have found that in darkness most people eventually adjust to a 48-hour cycle: 36 hours of activity followed by 12 hours of sleep". Wondering if this would be possible under normal circumstances (without the isolation, in daylight, with no psychological side effects).