For anybody following this thread, I started a new thread where you can see my progress with the things that interested me in the post above:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=169645
Most importantly, I am providing tools to recover bricked kindles, which have been used successfully by mutliple kindle owners. I am also working on extensions to this for root access, jailbreak, and application installations. I plan to provide support for Kindle 3 and earlier as well.