Ah, thanks HQ. I feel really off balance after my time off from the forum. 
You did specifically talk about that in post #57, I just didn’t absorb it when I looked at your post. I’m not 100% sure what’s up with the weird GND path for the existing MCU on the FT driver. IIRC we may have seen something similar in ImA4Wheelr’s HX-1175b1 thread? I dunno and I’m not going to try and hunt it down right now. I do strongly suspect that I’ve seen similar wiring on another Chinese driver. For me it’s good enough that you noticed the same thing, tried it with the ATtiny, and ended up changing it to a direct GND.
On a side note HQ, do you really work with your Eagle set to a white background or do you just do that for screenshots? I just tried it and ouch it didn’t feel good - especially with both the bottom and top stuff enabled at the same time, where I spend a fair amount of time. Maybe I’d get used to it. 
For anyone who doesn’t use Eagle: the default is black like in the screenshots I sometimes post.
I don’t yet understand how the lack of the pulldown/bleed resistors would burn a PAM2803. Hopefully when the parts to build this thing show up I’ll be really motivated and setup the scope. (I laid out a lot of cash for that thing, we should get some use out of it…) With the scope on 1xAA we can observe the behavior without the pulldown/bleeder. Then install them (stack the bleeder on the output cap and airwire the pulldown) and check everything with the scope again. With any luck this will demonstrate any spikes they may help minimize without burning the PAM2803.