I just read something two pages back in this thread that more or less confirms my frustration with the mind-numbing inability people seem to have to figure things out.

UBoot does not make charging impossible or a problem. Okay, I am pretty sure you can't boot normally, with the charger out, and then stick the charger in while it's on the uboot screen, and get it to start charging that way. But I know for a fact that if your N900 is off, and you plug it in to the charger, you will get a light-less uboot screen. Which, if you DON'T TOUCH, will complete its countdown and then load the kernel, which will THEN drop into the normal off-but-charging mode.

I don't know how you people didn't figure that out. Okay, maybe some hardware revisions play differently with uboot. Maybe. But I kinda doubt it. So what I really think is that the people who killed their battery unable to charge didn't have the patience to sit there for a few minutes after plugging in the cable when their device was off. That, or the kernel attached to their uboot was f'ed up, and then that's not really uboot's problem.