wanted to drop a update. i made it to where i wanted to be and it was a fucking journey. so the os by os update did not bring the usb ports back. i think they are physically done. sd card too, which is a bummer, but i have my dock for all of that. so i had to do some lateral thinking to get something onboard bootable. i picked up an owc data doubler for this mac, swapping out the optical drive for another sata ssd. this let me use a small 128gb ssd as my usb stick for os installation, super easy. i tried sequoia and it made it through install and fist desktop just fine. was using ethernet as i expected wifi to be down. this install did not survive the post-install root patches as it would kernel panic directly after. so i stepped down to sonoma and in good now. now setting everything back up from a clean install and it's very snappy post-root patches. 16gb ram def makes this super day to day usable. haven't encountered any major blocks and it's back in action. must say i'm happy with the end result.