You can talk this around in circles, actually:
"...using Drupal for this as most (but not all) of the requirements of the academics are for resource sharing."
If that is all you want to do, then using the folder structures of a networked drive is going to achieve the same thing, why bother with Drupal.
This is the most simple and most basic manner of trying to encourage use of ICT resources, something most of us here left behind a decade or more ago. This is mainly managing content, not doing anything with it.
If you want to do some collaborative authoring, then Google Docs or WikiSpaces will fit that bill.
If you want something more, then you need a LMS, in which case, Blackboard is expensive and has many undocumented features when too many people are logged into it. D2L is just as stable as Blaackboard apparently, everywhere except in price. Sakai is a java based tool, I seem to recall, and has all the risks of any such tool. Canvas uses Ruby, but is still in very early development. There are others, but these are the ones most comonly mentioned here. The most stable use of technology has to be Moodle, even if it might be considered unattractive in its current incarnation, with the AMP configuration.
As a quiet word in your shell-like, and out of consideration for others, this discussion could have been placed in your previous discussion, so everyone will have a sense of what has been said previously - if they want to add something. This is not really a new topic, or new question, but an extension of your previous one. IOn that one, a number of issues have been raised and responded to, including this one.