You know what else is awesome? This just solved something I didn't know how to do for a couple of months (I was writing a command-line tool to change R&D Mode flags on-device - qwerty12 made one in the old days long forgotten that has a simple GUI, but it's gui-ONLY and not useful from the recovery consoles, which you may want to turn R&D mode on/off from).

ANYWAY - I've just rebooted my N900 using the open source getbootstate and it WORKED. Now, it worked only ONCE, since I have only rebooted with it once. But it worked, no R&D mode on or anything, no errors thrown out. I call that reason to tentatively get our hopes up.