I don't have answers to most if not all of your questions.
For now though, I'll add that I've just become a proud owner of a Skippa that the previous owner didn't want any more. As promised by him, it appears to be in perfect working order. He was happy with it, but didn't want to pay for an ICETV subscription.
I took note of what Warkus posted re the high temperature the SOC IC runs and confirmed that out in the open, i.e. not in an enclosed cabinet and with nothing on top of it, it runs at around 65-70 deg C (ambient 25 deg C). It runs about 10 deg cooler when the unit is in Standby, i.e. the video output is turned OFF.
As I'm going to be putting it in a cabinet, I've added a small 40mm fan inside the unit directly in front of the SOC IC heat sink. The noise level is almost imperceptible - and less than what the HDU makes.
The heat-sink temperature under the same condition, i.e. the unit out in the open (but lid in place as before) has dropped to 45 deg. Ambient temperature still at 25 deg C.
It does of course run 24/7 as there is no deep standby in the Skippa, unlike the Beyonwiz T2, to which I've also added the same fan. The T2 (with a 3rd tuner USB tuner) case is almost the same size as the Skippa and is supplied fan-less too. The HDD puts out very little heat in comparison to the SOC IC, so even if you were to put in an SDD drive, it would only reduce the overall case temperature slightly and do nothing for the SOC chip temperature.
I'll be running these two PVRs in parallel when I've got them both fully configured. So far impressions are too preliminary to comment really - if there is sufficient interest I could post these later - perhaps Whirlpool might be the best place to do this? Dave/Daniel?