Feedback on USB Restoration

First off, I just want to say that I am extremely happy overall with my Unraid experience. I spent a lot of time researching products for my needs and Unraid has gone above and beyond my initial expectations when I migrated last year.

Now, this past weekend I noticed some odd things going on with my setup. One of my containers wouldn't update, then Unraid complained about my boot drive being write protected, Connect flash backup would deactivate randomly, etc. I pulled my boot drive and sure enough it had some issues. A quick trip to the store netted me a 3-pack of drives and I got to work. After downloading and launching the USB Creator, I'm greeted with [incompatible]. I'm sure you know where this is going...

I bought SanDisk Ultra Fit drives (which were my only option) and was completely oblivious to the SanDisk shadowban. It took an hour and a half to understand what was going on and what my options were even though my GUID was legit. After understanding the manual method, I ran into the hurdle that my 4-month-old version (6.12.8) was seemingly not hosted on the download archive anymore, so I had to hunt down a randomly hosted copy of that. At the end of the evening, I had the license transferred and everything was up and running (on the "incompatible" drive no less), but boy was it a hassle.

I understand licensing is a challenge and that Lime Tech has to protect their interests. Working in an industry where I have to deal with software licensing regularly, I also appreciate that license transfers are completely automated and don't require Support's involvement. I know that USB-based licensing is the most efficient method that meets your requirements, and that you're well aware of the various headaches it can cause users. I don't have any good suggestions you haven't already explored, so I won't comment more on that. However, I do have a few pieces of feedback from this experience:

1. Include an option in the USB Creator to allow any drive to be used even if it's suspected not to have a valid GUID. Put it behind warnings of the consequences, but don't completely deny a specific USB's use. My understanding is that, worst case scenario, the user just won't be able to license the system and start the array. IMO, the benefit of being able to boot your system and check config is still worth it.
2. Some kind of temporary license or grace-period on license mismatch detection would be a huge help for users that are stranded with a dead USB and don't have valid alternatives.
3. Host more previous versions. I understand that you can't host everything and that there has to be a line somewhere, but I was shocked to see that there are only 2 archived versions (6.12.9 and 6.11.5).

Again, super happy with Unraid overall. Thank you for a great product and for reading this far.