[General Questions and Answers] Pibble:
Interesting tidbits of observation while bricking my phone for roughly a month (not because of anything anyone here said, entirely my own doing while messing with low level stuff for my own exploratory entertainment! Seriously the devs here are amazing for figuring out what they do and they deserve a huge thanks!)

Logcat errors aplenty with the custom recovery due to it being a port of Decker's Alcatel Idol 4 recovery and that phone while being the same SoC, has slightly different hardware, namely the battery and MMC capacity. Nothing special, just cant properly detect charge state.

ADB driver reporting back Alcatel signature when you dont allow a fresh flash to run at least one init cycle, which would be expected, but interesting nonetheless.

You as a matter of fact, can switch between the firmwares and relock your second sim if you backed up all the partitions with TWRP, but you need to remember to update your modem to the proper version your original backup had, otherwise the device wont detect the modem at all (ended up with a SS build 35 with 33 modem for a few hours before I figured out why the sim wasnt detected)

^ This also really threw me for a loop when trying to unroot and "re-stock" the device as it would init fine and transition into android, then hang on optimizing apps resulting in a bootloop that was in android proper, not during init which was really hard to troubleshoot due to no real error logging, Im assuming it was an issue with the initial setup apk not being able to properly detect something causing a kernel panic or other such hard fault, except for god knows what reason, I flashed the custom recovery, AND rooted, either with magisk 16 (yes it worked fine, so thats a thing) or supersu. It would refuse to load into initial setup without some sort of superuser bin present, if anyone could explain to me, why this might be, Im highly curious.

I used windows 7 64, and simply let it install the drivers on its own, I never once had to install the drivers provided, so take that for what its worth, I actually had more problems trying to install the drivers and get the compatibility set up that I just gave up after 10 minutes when I first started.

If for whatever reason, you just want root and dont want two sim slots, you can in fact just leave it with SS firmware and the custom recovery/root, thats a thing, I ran my phone like that for over a month just fine that way aside from the logcat issue I mentioned.

After one of these last 3 or so google play framework updates, the behavior of the analytics and everything related to google play services legit looks like straight up malicious software behavior, so I will be looking into how to lock that down in the near future. (entirely unrelated to the phone, just an observation that is concerning with the state of android in general)

If anybody here is interested in a little deeper related learning , CVE-2017-13174 and CVE-2017-5947 provide some really interesting rabbit holes related to Qualcomm EDL Programmers and the extensive exploitability/venerability therein.

Anyways I just figured I would share anecdotal information from my personal experience, I am but a noob when it comes to all off this developer stuffs, but if my blunders, mistakes, and general derpiness can help anyone either not make the same mistakes, or possibly help someone who is even less tech savvy than myself out of a sticky situation, I figure its worth sharing.