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Plywood is great but as you say not really suited to hand tools.

I feel like a lot of the advice here is coming from people who are thinking about this stuff with a power tool mindset. Honestly I think what you plan to do works fine and isn’t quiet as crazy as this this thread would suggest.

Ripping wood with hand tools is hard work and having tried a few options I eventually bought a very small hobby bandsaw. Within a few months I was confident it was a useful tool for me using hand tools mainly (and lots of hand tool type sources online suggest reasons they are useful). I’ve then come the same conclusion you seem to be exploring which is can a decent sized bandsaw be useful while using hand tools. The answer is clearly yes. I have zero interest in getting a P/T as frankly I can do what they do with hand planes and I’m happy to do it.

Sounds like you’re open to having a P/T in the future so I guess one question is do you want the bandsaw for other reasons than thicknessing because if not it’s maybe more sensible to go for the P/T first as that’s what it’s good at.