Does anyone know if it is possible to play with charging scripts so that we could solder directly onto the system board rather than requiring a charging circuit to be crammed under the battery cover along with the inductive loop. Of course we would want to preserve USB host mode and charging.

One crude option is adding a shorting switch to the USB data pads under the battery but this is very inconvenient requiring shutdown, switching, and bootup before the USB port can be used.