Well, on the plus side, once the BP team does get those core mechanics figured out, and they can be easily applied from one mission to the next (not having to reinvent the wheel every time), they might make some FREDing progress.
I'm doing mostly the same thing for my campaign. Setting up all those SEXPs to get my first mission running properly was a nightmare. But now that it's done, I have a 'blank' mission template, which requires (at most) aggressive copy-pasting. Now I can slam out a decent mission in just a few hours, because the player's ship handles mostly the same from mission to mission.
I would totally give to a BP kickstarter. But it's not one of those things that can be solved by throwing money at it.