So, I may have been playing a bit the past several days...
I've been trying to see what I can get away with behind Nickel's back, without actually having to kill Nickel. This was born from ideas from kobo-rclone, but I wanted to push things further.
So after some experimentation, getting sidetracked and creating an onscreen keyboard using FBInk (oops...), and many device reboots, I'm finally starting to get something that is faintly approaching stability. I will note that my H2O has carried on like a trooper, although it's probably wondering if there is a Union to join...
Where I'm at currently is I can switch into USBMS mode, remount the internal memory partition (to a different mountpoint, just in case), and crucially, enable WiFi.
Once there, one can do what one wishes to do without having to kill Nickel. Touch input even becomes viable (I may have written a touch driver to go along with the onscreen keyboard). I finally figured out today, that Nickel appears to kill the touch screen after a few seconds in USBMS mode. HOWEVER, not if the Wifi gets re-enabled, which makes me wonder if there is a link somewhere.
This was all done in Go.
Here's a screenshot of what I currently have:
I just thought you folks might be interested. I've got plans for this. PLANS I say