It was a joke. I would say you lost your argument in the beginning itself when you mentioned startpage.
Either enable WDP protocol or use Result Hunter (which uses google/bing index itself). Yandex Search less censored than Brave Search? Please say it isn't so! - #27 by chh_68
There are only 4-5 search engines with their own index - google, bing, mojeek, brave search (it’s own index not fully fledge-in beta), gigablast etc. Indexing the full web and presenting it to users by relevance is not an easy thing to do. As you said, more technical experts than you (and me) are working for a private search engine with their own index. So, let them work on it.