It may well be the case that when everything works OK R&D is not needed. However Maemo is a very delicate system where minor fvck-ups in the boot process will lead to a boot loop unless R&D is on (watchdogs).

So my advice is to leave it on. No disadvantages, but (potential) advantages if something goes seriously wrong.

I wrote "if USB breaks AND you brick it". I assume you cannot run your tool from a bricked device

Fine. If you take Debian as an example: you can do autoremove and dist-upgrade until you get bored, because the dependencies are done right (it *is* bloated, but at least coherent). So you can use, say, synaptic, and play with it without fear that suddenly your kernel will be installed but not the modules (which, judging from the problems people around here have, seems to be one of the main causes).

In Maemo, I submit, you only remove/upgrade/install if you are able to:
(1) see EXACTLY what's gonna happen. Which packages are going to be removed, upgraded or new-installed; and preferably:

(2) you actually understand the consequences of (1).

With HAM or FAM you don't get this level of detail. With apt-get you do.

Yup. or equivs (this is something I used to use in Ubuntu to remove plymouth).

In the end I didn't continue this because having HAM per se doesn't bother me that much. It still gives me a bit of an itch but I tend to not think about this unless I'm really bored

In a way, having fiasco-image-update-ask is a safety measure which can actually alert you if you're not fully awake.

Perhaps Pali could tell why this depends on HAM?

R&D mode dioes other stuff as well, not only enable blinken lights. For example it enables UART3 which constantly draws some power. So it's really no option to enable R&D mode on all systems. I realy recommend rather installing rootsh instead

/j