There's a fine line here when dealing with customers. Sometimes it works well to answer the exact question, if you can, and follow up with "Can you tell me a bit why you're asking so I can understand a bit more about the problem?" Once you tease out a bit more about how they got there, it's often possible to offer better solutions and it never feels like you blew off their original ask.
I know when I run into bugs in a project I depend on, I'll usually run it down and fix it myself, because I need it fixed. Writing it up the bug along with the PR and sending it back to the maintainer feels like common courtesy. And if it gets merged in, I don't need to fork/apply patches when I update. Win-win, I'd say.
But if maintainers don't want to take PR's, that's cool, too. I can appreciate that it's sometimes easier to just do it yourself.
That sorta surprised me. Once I could identify a connector type from a schematic, it was almost never a huge problem getting them in small (1 to 5 piece) quantities. It's mostly a question of finding the right distributor.
Interesting...1999 is probably a bit early for that Bosch to be running one of the usual ECU update protocols like UDS. It sounds like it's in the bootloader and looking for a valid executable. So the FW updater is likely in the bootloader.
If you can open it up and find the JTAG pads, it should be simple-ish to use a JTAG reader to dump the image and then you can figure out the update protocol from that. It's unlikely to be complicated.
ECU software development is sort of my day job. If you're going to go down this path, I seriously recommend getting the specialized plugs and connectors and making your own wiring harnesses to whatever size you need. It's absolutely easier than manhandling a full wiring harness or cutting one down. Cheaper, too.
I mean...you should always design with speed in mind (In that Jeff Dean sense :) but what 'premature optimization' is referring to, is more like localized speed optimizations/hacks. Don't do those until a) you know you'll need it and b) you know where it will help.
Ok, fellow old hacker here. I have a similar problem and I found that a lot of the hand pain was from mouse/trackpad usage. My hands have been a lot happier since going to a trackball because I don't do nearly as much gripping and pressing.
Is my remote experiences strange or do other remote workers not have some sort of chat where people ask if you've got a minute and drop in a video conference link if they need a quick chat on something?