I would like to talk more about these things - would you like to share email addresses? PM me if so.

Done.

I'll remark that back in December after reading Anna Salamon's posting on the SIAI Visting Fellows program I did send Anna Salamon a long email expressing some degree of interest and describing some my concerns without receiving a response. I now find it most plausible that she just forgot about it and that I should have tried again, but maybe you can understand from this how I got the impression that becoming an SIAI Visiting Fellow was not a strong option for me.

As it happens, the same thing happened to me; it turned out that my initial message had been caught in a spam filter. I eventually ended up visiting for two weeks, and highly recommend the experience.