So, following up on a twitter thread. IIRC all the IO pads are configured using a serial bus. That bus is controlled from the caravel. Any chance someone with a FIB could tap that bus and manually load a good IO pad config ?

That seems hard to do. FIB jobs are expensive, so you have to weight that cost against just feeding these projects into a future shuttle run. . . time vs. money (and a lot of either one). If you can tap a probe into the three serial lines (clock, data, load/reset) then yes, you could force the serial load to complete. Those lines probably don't go above metal3, so you'd need some pretty deep cuts to reach them.

Yeah, obviously this would be more of "something fun to try" if any one happens to have access to a FIB already.