Has no one yet identified space on the scratch partition that could be used instead of flash ?

Reserved space? IIRC there is none. According to peter, the scratch partition as currently laid out doesn't even have enough room to store running orders of grzelakian proportions across reboots.

However, I did get the impression that post-2.0 they were going to increase the density of the FID/running order entries in hda3 beyond one FID per sector. If that were done, maybe we could ask them real nicely if they could set aside some space at the end which would be reserved for user hacks. Then we'd just have to have an Empeg Assigned Sectors Authority responsible for doling out sector numbers to application developers. And then we'd have speculators buying up all the sectors and reselling them. See the can of worms you've opened?