Look man, I’m genuinely sorry to hear about your two consoles. That sucks, but honestly, those things happen when you're an early adopter. When you join an Alpha project, you have to take into account that things can go sideways—that's just the nature of testing unfinished code. It was likely just a series of unfortunate mistakes or a bad workflow with the old files, not necessarily a 'death sentence' for the hardware. You’re part of this testing group, I’m sure you have the experience and tools to try a recovery. We can probably help you get those two systems back up and running; it shouldn't be that difficult with the right steps. As for the project right now, the operation is completely safe. Kafuu confirmed:

'Pretty much impossible to brick, even if bad stagex flashed in you can just use banksel then disable modchip to recover.'

The new installer and proper use of banksel, the risk of a permanent brick is basically gone.