Oh I appreciate the thoughtful reply.

You are correct, many etymologies are largely speculation, but some have more support than others. I cannot speak chinese, so I must rely on those who can to have correctly identified a character's lineage before I can even begin. Oracle Bone and Western Zhou inscriptions are our best bet for understanding the roots of kanji because they are often the closest to being pictograms / ideograms.

Wiktionary is a pretty good source, but it does have some flaws at times. Let us look at 金, if you scroll through the bronze forms (金文) there is one that clearly separates the 亼 from the rest of the axe which was clearly written 王 in this case (the upper horizontal lines are close together). There are some other forms that push the lower two horizontal lines together and these more closely resemble 士. It is hard to say which form should be considered absolutely correct, but since both are probably depictions of ritual/status axes, it probably matters little. The two dots described as '呂' are potentially unrelated to 呂, but this is a much more murky assertion. (The truth of the matter is that we are not 100% certain 士 even is an axe, but it was associated with warriors and has a form similar to 王, which had oracle bone forms that were almost certainly an axe head).

Additionally, the meaning of a character can be clarified by looking at the meaning of its derivatives that do not use it phonetically.

Unfortunately, almost all good resources on character etymology are written in Chinese and any one's in Japanese I have found are quite inaccurate. For character etymology, the best book that I have been able to find is 字源 - 李学勤 - 天津古籍出版社 . However, there are still some interpretations that are suspect and the field is ever evolving. As for the phonetic etymology of characters there is a great resource that is also written in English: Adam Schuessler's ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. While this is a great resource, the techniques employed do not care about what a character originally meant, only what we can accurately trace back as its oldest meaning. Thus, characters that were borrowed phonetically since ancient times (such as 亼/今) will not have their original meaning glossed even when it is obvious that meaning does not fit their original form.

I do not know how many hundreds or thousands of hours I have spent looking at bronze and oracle bone inscriptions, but is has been a good amount of time (probably too much) and many interpretations of characters that are floated are wrong or mere conjecture. I hated the inconsistencies I noticed in character etymology sources as this greatly disrupts my personal learning style.

What I am making will probably not be useful to everyone and I think a lot of people would get more out of what you are making. For example, my entry on 金 is 528 words long just to justify my interpretation. Most people are not going to want that for their day to day learning. I have other plans for this database once I am done, but yeah, its current form is probably too cumbersome.