I'll give it a shot today. Hope I don't end up flashing the device. Again.

If it works, I'll let you know.

By the way, personally, I would go for using sudo whenever possible and refrain from working as root, but that's a choice you have to make for yourself.

If this won't work, you can install openssh, create an ssh key, and enable login with that key as root. Than you create an alias for the user account like:

alias beroot='ssh root@localhost'

That should do the trick as well. But: I need the sudoers file as well, so I'll get back to you.