I don’t know if you are asking me or anyone in particular, but it is the Parachain Technical Fellowship we’re talking about here. The technical capacity for fellowships obviously exists based on the existence of the protocol Technical Fellowship.
The timeline is whenever someone writes a vision for how this group will be structured, what its role in the ecosystem will be, what kinds of powers it will ask governance to be handed over to it (e.g. change force_set_current_code from Root origin to PTF origin), who qualifies for membership and promotion, how to seed the group, etc. Parachain teams obviously know best what challenges parachain teams face. I don’t think “wait for Parity to do it” is the right strategy.
Gav wrote the forum post for the Technical Fellowship with those details in September 2022, and the Tech Committee initialized the group in November. Add in the time to write up the manifesto and seeding process ahead of that and you can get a good timeline. 3 months seems reasonable.
I’m not sure what you mean by “access this service”. Do you mean join the PTF? Entry requirements should be part of the manifesto. “Buy your way in” seems like a bad approach IMO. Or do you mean access funds under the PTF treasury? Of course, simple referendum from the PTF to approve a spend. Or do you mean fund the PTF treasury? I’d envision the PTF making a funding proposal itself to the main Treasury. Of course other chains can add assets to the PTF treasury if they want.
“Replacing Subscan” does not seem like a “several months” solution either :).