You may not think you are being negative, but apparently I am not the only one thinking so, @Ada_L’s offer is much more specific and approachable that my proposal (where I suggested various approaches). I think Ada’s proposal is simpler and it is very easy to implement a reward button with a Taler payment link (it’s just a payto: URI that people can easily add to their custom_fields, and work from there.)
I do not understand why you think this is difficult:
Since more than a thousand free software projects have been doing just that for the last 6 years and ripped off the benefits in the order of dozens of millions of euros. I think you lack insight into the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet program, and especially the very low overhead cascading funding that goes with NGI Zero (and NGI TALER). Preparation work for such a proposal is about two days work (there’s a form, and you should come up with milestones), so it’s not much difficulty “engaging with the consortium”. And I repeat that it would be awesome for The Pavilion to take this up and implement GNU Taler payments for Discourse. It can be done in several steps over a year or two, and you can get up to 500,000 € for this.
My special interest would be Discourse ↔ Solidus integration but, as you noted, there was not much traction so far.