Major UFO mod from newbie basis

Hi there!

I was playing around with the thought of making a mod for UFO (I think I have v1.2 - It's not DOS, that's for sure) which includes the following changes:

-Different looking armor (but that's easy, replacing armor has already been done)
-Some different music (I'll make the new tunes with my keyboard and replacing the MID's is enough, right?)
-More "realistic" starting weapons:
-3 types of rifle: a fast, inaccurate one with lots of ammo (FN-P90), a medium one (M4A1) and a slow, accurate one with a small clip (FN-FAL).

-turning the heavy cannon and auto cannon into a sniper rifle (M82) and a machine gun (M249)
-also renaming a few items
-as well as giving the plasma weapons more structure (turn the heavy plasma into a plasma MG, add a plasma sniper)

-must research weaker plasma weapons before you can research stronger ones (pistol before rifle, rifle before sniper, sniper before MG)

-If possible, but I know that this is a very idealistic goal, add more cities for terror attacks.
-Add the ability of increasing Psi Strength so that soldiers' psi defense is improvable
-make some changes to the research tree (personal armor => Synthetic Muton skin armor)
-Since the basic armor is that camouflage stuff, I'd like to add a program which adapts the type of camouflage to the terrain. Maybe add some camouflage effect or even stealth weapons and invisibility?

How much of this is possible, what programs do I need to do that, is the amount of work I'm looking at realistic for one person of should I get help?

I know it all sounds over-idealistic like a small child and so on, and I know that even IF I try doing something, it may not surpass changing the pistol's description text and adding one battle tune, but please just tell me what I'm talking about, just so I know.

And no, I have no problems with you laughing ^_^


[Edit: Added ideas

-Hire soldiers for 40k, veterans for 60k and commandos for 100k who have better starting values. Commandos should also have a guarantee for 80+ psi strength.
-Support Phaser Pistol: A pistol which can be loaded with Neutron Phase Ammo for accurate shooting and low damage and Stun Phase Ammo for accurate long-range stun shooting. If it's possible, it should include a motion tracker, too. So you need to research a) Motion Trackers, b) Laser and Plasma Pistols for the weapon itself, c) Plasma rifle ammo for the Neutron Phase ammo and d) small bombs for the Stun phase ammo. Is this possible? This would be a good weapon for supporter units like Psi or Medic units.
-Alien Smoke Grenades
-Again, this is exaggeration in it's puremost form, but let me say it anyway - this is just raw idea collecting. Might it be possible to implement some elements of reputation to paying countries like special missions from a certain country or messages to them, or things like "Get us 20 sectoid corpses and we promise to pay well next month"?]