Very Interesting, it sounds like you are already fetching work from the pool successfully.
Since you are thinking about chip selection, the Bitmain ASIC uses a chip called BM1740 which has 144 MB of RAM which (unfortunately) is enough to run Equihash (at the current specs of 200,9) Perhaps the developers will change these specs in the future.
Z9 chips/teardowns:
From what I’ve seen FPGAs have a very steep learning curve and coding them properly is one of the main reasons they aren’t used more. I’ve seen one YouTuber asking for help with a FPGA that he bought but couldn’t get it working without code
I am a proponent of getting Zcash mining hardware into as many hands as possible which is why I supported GPU miners and am not a big fan of ASICs. What if FPGAs are a mining solution?
Quick brainstorm:
FPGAs are widely available (assumption)
Zcash Foundation sponsors coders (like you) to release open-source FPGA software for everyone.
Zcash Parameters are FPGA friendly and change every few months and coincide with the FPGA software release.
Could that help level the playing field between FPGAs and ASIC? To match this ASICs would have to become FPGAs like the Blackminer F1 