passthepopcorn.me has an 'archive team' with a lot of redundant storage available and they also have 'encoding teams' with quite a few passionate, motivated people each with decades of experience in video restoration. They've got the free time that you lack and generally would be quite happy to learn new techniques from you and take critical feedback into account.
Correct. I imagined GP could chat with them over IRC and quickly establish both rapport (with encoding nerds) and value (rare, impossible to find source media) and get an invite.
