Thanks for those links, I have had a look at most, not sure about funding specific development. We had done this in vB for several of our mods that were key to our operation and found that maintenance through upgrades became a complete nightmare when the mods did not work and the developers were either no longer supporting the product or had vanished altogether.
We are now only 2 weeks live with xF, and are taking it easy with modifications to see how we can limit our customisation without killing our user experience and killing our Moderators/Admins workflow and workload.
Having this functionality in core would be great.
At the moment we are looking at google drive integration as a potential alternative solution.