Personally, I don't see how one serial programmer could harm the radio any more than another, or how a serial programmer could harm the radio at all.
Yeah, definitely. Not a lot of people realize this, but we are *not* writing firmware to the radio, but rather writing a table of things for the radio to look at when you select a particular channel. This process should be absolutely bulletproof, and a full reset of the device should always undo any of the things we're writing to it. If it's not, you don't want to own that radio anyway.
I'll note that Yaesu radios are the *worst* about verifying the incoming image of all the major manufacturers. Most of the $30 chinese radios do as good a job (or in some cases, better) than the $300+ Yaesu radios. Even with that, a reset has always been able to resolve any state of confusion I've been able to get one into.
Fun fact, chirp is slower than the RT Systems software to program so clearly it isn't like we are overheating some component by talking to fast or anything stupid like that.
Yeah, good point. This is an artifact of the fact that CHIRP uses a single routine (or variation of it) to program the VX-series handhelds. Yaesus implement no flow control on the line, and they can't accept data at the full line speed (unlike Icoms, Kenwoods, Alincos and all the Chinese radios I've seen). This means that we end up writing data to the radio at the lowest common speed that all of them will accept, which is slower than an application tuned specifically for one model would.