I think if the flames holds the private key itself, will be impossible to decode it without the rest of the picture, because if it could be decoded only with operations over the flames, paiting the chess board and the other pieces will be a waste of time for the creator. I think that the chess board is too full of symbols to be only a distraction...
I'm saying this because over the whole thread the flames kept 80% of the attention, and I'm not talking about the 10000% zoom things, the jpeg glitches or the rabbit, simply the pieces and their meaning.
well for one thing the leaves seem to have been (at least partially) incorporated to the big picture. They seem to give the order on feature streams and they seem to tell which feature values should be decoded as 1 and 0. The same for the key ribbons, there are ideas around on how to use them. So it is not that everybody just idles with flames

Agree with you, just saying because I'm seeing a lot of effort on flames, like the lines of code from @kn0w0n3. But for example, nobody talks about why that kind of creeper plant is holding the queen while it melts... Maybe applying maths, logic and counting is not the way for this one. Take this only as thoughts, I really admire all the work being done here. (And in previous puzzles that I followed too).