Yep, quite a few hurdles to not only understand, but overcome.
That's gonna be a lot of clay if you have to create a 5 acre x 2' thick clay liner. Then we add the dam mass, which will also be homogeneous, contiguous with the pond liner. All this, and the fear of leaks. Man, Nutty...does any of this dream have something to do with your handle?
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Have you shot elevations between the existing lake and your low spot water level? I would be VERY curious to see if they are, indeed, the same elevation. If they are, you already know where I'm going with this. The next ? is does the lake level fluctuate much. Is it possible that your pond is more of a drag-line excavation project?
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Have you actually taken soil samples from different areas of the pondsite? What is your soils assessment based on?
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I had a whole bunch of topsoil within my 5 ac natural bowl. I thought I had the hot set-up all laid out. I ran ads in the paper for Free topsoil; U-haul; 5000+ Cu yds avail and had quite a few inquiries. Most of the inquiries were for a t/l or two, but there were 3 or 4 that wanted all that I had. These verbal deals were cut in February, to be executed in the next couple of months, after the thaw. Well, after the thaw, all the equipment that these jokers expected to use to haul free TS was being used to make bigger bux on real jobs. Ultimately, nobody came thru and I wound up leaving the vast portion of the site TS in the bottom of the pond. Yes, alot of it was used for the peripheral "above water" zones, but most of it is underwater right now. When you do the math, to excavate 5000 cu yds over the 3 acre zone that most of it was located in, the couple/three feet of additional depth was not going to make-break my project. I sure wasn't going to pay somebody to haul it away.