I know what's blowing it up, yes. The attempt to hack in the Cherry shared libs (which presumably should have worked since they were built against 2.3) failed miserably last night with unresolved additional symbols. That was the "dirty hack" approach. There may be hope for that approach left but it was rapidly turning into an "interminable snowball" problem (moving additional .so files risks corrupting something else in CM7 and there's a point where wisdom says you halt - I reached it) so I ditched that approach (for now) late last evening rather than go further down that rabbit hole. If I have to come back to it I will, but it was looking more and more like a flat-out dead end that could easily break more than it was going to fix.
The "fix the damn code" approach is what's left. The good news is that there's a msm7x30 driver, which is the audio chipset that the phone has, and which the kernel driver exposes in accessible devices. The bad news is that there are several unresolved symbols in the code in CM7, which is very not-nice and at least slightly-implies that it has never been used (VERY not-nice if true, as it might not work at all!) Some of those we can live without (e.g. the FM radio stuff which I understand won't work in any event as there isn't one in the hardware) and some we might be able to live without (e.g. QCELP) but resolving the undeclared references is where I am right now.
This, of course, assumes the code that's in CM7 (with those resolved references) runs. If it doesn't then the trouble is much more serious as I have zip, zero and nada on documentation for this particular audio chipset nor on exactly what Android needs to see in this regard.
Incidentally a side project for someone who wants to get inventive would be to take the Cherry nb0 file that others report works except for the radio (DO NOT FLASH THIS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES AS IT SITS - IT WILL REPARTITION YOUR PHONE AND IF YOU DO THAT YOU ARE SCREWED!), extract the system.img (easy), splice in the Motorola kernel, rild, and ril libraries (fairly easy) and make a Clockwork out of that. None of that's particularly hard and shouldn't take more than a handful of hours to do and test. There's a non-zero chance that works right out of the box. If it fails, however (if it's going to fail it will be on the radio) it's a total dead end. I'm not inclined to do it but if someone wants the kernel I built and RIL bits I can package those up into a zip and stuff 'em somewhere or explain how to do it if you just make a system.img that Clockwork can flash, then use that plus the existing file I uploaded. If you want to chase this path please do not pollute this thread with it - start a new one, and I'll help you there, not here.