Re funding my own breeding, especially the tomato project--Asking directly for donations, doing crowdfunding, and going for grants are not mutually exclusive. I'll probably try em all before I'm done.
As for the reference to Raul Robinson--this refers to the idea that there is "horizontal" and "vertical" resistance, that these are actually different from each other, and that "horizontal" is slower to be overcome by the evolution of the pathogen. It's additionally assumed that horizontal resistance is dependent upon multiple genes with small affects, and vertical resistance is dependent upon one gene with major effects (the sort of gene university breeders transfer into their varieties). It's normally assumed that heirlooms have horizontal resistance, but this is only until someone actually does some crosses and looks.
Then, my impression is that the heirloom usually turns out to have no measurable resistance--or it actually has one of those major resistance genes, exactly the same ones involved in "vertical" resistance. Ph1 is a good case in point. It was present in a number of heirlooms, which would undoubtedly, in the absence of serious genetic investigation, been called "horizontal" resistance. It conferred serious resistance in its day. However, it was overridden by more modern lines of late blight, and now doesn't confer useful resistance.
Whether a variety's resistance is easily out-evolved by the pathogen is not any such simple thing as one-gene-bad, more-genes good, either. For example, Jim Baggett's pea varieties that carry one gene for resistance to pea enation virus and one for powdery mildew and one for wilt--which let's them be grown all the way from spring to fall--are still nicely resistant to the respective diseases, though they have been around for decades.
Generally, though, from first principles you can guess that if you have two different major genes for resistance to something, your variety is less vulnerable to evolution of the pathogen than just one.
Ph2 and Ph3 show a different repertoire of what lines of late blight they are sensitive too. However, both genes act as codominants and act quantitatively with respect to each other. So varieties that are homozygous for both generally show strong resistance to all strains of blight; varieties that are homozygous for just one, or heterozygous for both show less resistance, with levels more dependent upon specific strains.
Another way of looking at it. Let's suppose that after we've developed a new generation of heirlooms with Ph2 and Ph3 in them, whether someone who didn't know what we did would call them "horizontal" or "vertical" resistance. Well, before they did serious genetics, they would probably just assume they had horizontal resistance. If they then went and did the serious genetic analysis in the absence of testing specifically for Ph2 and Ph3, they would probably still think the resistance was horizontal. Because it would look quantitative under field conditions.
One thing that is very valuable about working with wild material is you might discover additional genes conferring serious resistance to late blight. To show up as a QTL in something as hard to evaluate as disease resistance, especially in variable material, you pretty much would be talking about genes with major effects, by the way. Various university breeders are still "mining" wild material looking for new genes. Additional new genes would be valuable. Could you test for them using marker assisted selection? No. Marker assisted selection is based upon someone having identified a distinctive DNA sequence in or near the gene for resistance. So you could test wild-derived late-blight resistant material to see if it contains Ph2 or Ph3. But not PhX, something new. Of course, if your material doesn't have either of those genes and is resistant, it presumably is something new. So then you'd just give some to one of the university groups which is spending day and night looking for new Ph genes, and they would undoubtedly be very happy to do the molecular biology and identify a marker for the gene.