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When I first stumbled upon Richard Gabriels idea for a Master of Fine Arts in Software, it was already a decade old and had not materialzed anywhere, but I think that is more caused by misaligned incentives in the (post-graduate) educational system, than in the fundamental idea of the proposed program.

Education in this MFA program operates by providing a context in which students are constantly designing, writing, and working with software under supervision, with critique, and with explicit thought being given by the student to what the student is doing. One way to look at it is that the student is writing, designing, and working with software while paying attention. [..]

"While paying attention" is achieved principally through writing short essays called annotations. An annotation is a vehicle for the student to pay attention to one craft element at a time. A craft element is something that makes software effective and beautiful. Craft elements can range from the smallest coding details such as the choice of variable, function, class, or method names through the design of interfaces and protocols through the layout of information on a screen to the largest concerns such as the architecture of a system and descriptions of what to design. In essence, anything created that is a hallmark of what sets the extraordinary apart from the ordinary in software and software design is a craft element.

Suppose this were a good way to grow professionally as a software engineer: could this be achieved sustainbly within a community of like-minded persons outside of traditional academia?

In The Letter Circle Daniel Cook describes an idea of a low-volume, but high quality social network based on long-form writing. If you'd combine a group of peers in such a Letter Circle with the idea of writing annotations as defined by Gabriel, you'd basically get an organizational frame for a significant part of the educational process as layed out by the "MFA in Software" idea. Of course, there'll be no fancy piece of paper and no cool title at the end of it, but it also would not set your account back several grand... One really hard part: finding and sustaining that community of peers over a prolonged period of time.