Just posting an update here with a happy ending.
I couple weeks ago I had bought an original flash file off a site, but it didn't work at all. The owner of the shop asked me to send him what I had left of the corrupted flash, and he manually created a perfectly functional file, and everything is back to life! DME was immediately recognized as a me7.2 again, and everything is fine.
Incredible work. Guy has been working on ECU's for 20 years.
www.carpro.si, highly recommended for all things tuning and programming!
The next step was going to be just to swap in a spare ECU that I now have the ipass #'s for. It just arrived, but I'll be good to have a spare.
Cheers!