When a contentious question about the community's opinion is preventing consideration of one or more proposals, what is the best way forward, in general?
I am considering commissioning a survey of community opinion from a neutral and respected third party who has published a well-received survey of English wikipedians a few years ago.
The Foundation is not willing to help, in part because, "Reaching consensus on what wording to use, the quality of the results, and how to interpret the results will be very challenging and take significant amount of time." I would argue that not doing such a survey, or relying on opt-in methods like RFCs, are both worse than obtaining a respected third party to perform a straw poll of recent editors with an established history of contributions composed of a few unambiguous opinion questions.
If I did this, would anyone object to a gofundme intended to recover the cost of commissioning the survey on a voluntary basis?