That reminds me of another remark :
in your cut down preinit_harmattan is only one problem (compared your version with original one), the early start up of usb network! You remember?
I have it commented out, but now as I write I believe a configurable option could be nice to have early telnet/ssh possibilty during harmattan as we have in nitdroid and nemo. But I do not know if it makes sense at all and how to fetch config values in preinit? Do you get me, juiceme? Or just talking bullsh.t?

For preinit_nitdroid I also would like to fetch config values from ubiboot.conf, but who cares? Only me probably and so I just edit the preinit_nitdroid directly. Maybe one day I will get it starting from p5 !?