With current telescopes, finding dusty starbursts in the early universe is hard work. What you really need is a mm-wave telescope with really good resolution and collecting area on a high, dry site. That is why you are interested in proposals to build a mm-array: a network of lots of mm-wave telescopes, with oodles of collecting area, built at 5000m elevation at a site in the altiplano of northern Chile, near the Bolivian border. Using aperture synthesis, this telescope would have fantastic angular resolution. Not only could you find high redshift dusty galaxies, but you could use their molecular emission lines to map them, measure their velocity fields, temperatures and chemical compositions. It will be awesome! It should also be able to search for galaxies at redshifts beyond five, which are very hard to find with normal optical telescopes.
It is obvious to you that this is the best way to study the early universe and the formation of galaxies. Some of your colleagues seem to persist in the bizarre notion that you can study galaxy formation in the optical: you must gently show them the error in their ways.