[Ouya Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] PhyerFly:
I finally stumbled upon the right key combo timing again through sheer dumb luck. I took my Ouya out of my office and back into the living room, connected it to my TV with a USB keyboard and gave it one last try before giving up - glad I tried one last time.

For anyone else that is having trouble still, here's some things that might help as well as answers to my questions from above. Some of it is just speculation, but maybe it'll help someone:

Timing: As SOON as I tapped the power button on the Ouya I immediately held down ALT on the keyboard and every few seconds also pressed SYSRQ+i (never letting go of ALT). I believe I did it a total of five times and I stopped as soon as I saw the LED on the top of the Ouya turn off. I didn't really hold down the keys and count a few seconds like I've heard others mention, I just tapped SYSRQ+i around five times while holding down ALT. Menu popped up after the power led turned back on.

Driver: Make sure you followed the guide from the Ouya docs and have the right version of the Google USB driver installed (here's the Windows guide https://devs.ouya.tv/developers/docs/setup#toc_61). When my Ouya was booting to black it was showing up as an Android ADB Interface and a MTP usb device that it couldn't find a driver for. The correct identification should be Android ADB Composite Interface

ADB Make sure you're running the lastest version of ADB (1.0.31 currently). When I ran adb devices on the black screen it would return my device serial number and the string "device" which refers to the state it was in (occasionally this value would "offline" when I'd tried a key-combo that failed to get into recovery mode).

Once I got recovery mode up and selected the adb sideload option adb devices would show my Ouya serial number and say that it was in the "host" state. When I tried the adb sideload otafirmwarefile.zip command, it would fail because adb sideload wasn't a valid command in the older version of adb I was running. Running the google SDK manager from the ADT bundle, removing/re-installing android platform tools and logging out / in to Windows fixed this for me next time I opened a command prompt. Now with the right ADB version running adb devices on my micro-usb connected PC showed my device serial number and "sideload" as it's state.

Answers to my previous questions:

1.) Does the power LED on the top of the Ouya stay on when it's in recovery mode?

Yes and No. The light turned on when I powered it on, after alt+sysrq+i presses the light TURNED OFF momentarily and then turned back on just as the recovery mode screen came up​

2.) If you have the Ouya plugged in via micro-usb when you turn it on, do you hear the USB connect sound?

Not sure, when I got into recovery mode I had my micro-usb cable disconnected. I reconnected it once I selected the second option in the recovery menu (adb sideload)​

3.) Does your Ouya lose HDMI signal in the "boot to recovery" process?

Yes, at least mine did. I had black screen at boot, then it went to "no signal" at the same time the LED at the top went out, then the screen came back on when the recovery mode screen came up​

4.) If your USB keyboard has LED's on it to show when caps/num/scroll lock are pressed, do they illuminate when plugged into your Ouya?

No, the LEDs on my USB keyboard never lit up, but the keyboard was working.​