Alright, I've received some feedback from the factory on the blinking LCD issues, and it sounds like it's not a big deal in this case.

Suave posted some temperature numbers he retrieved from within the monitoring software yesterday, that looked like this: 58-52-46-44-58-80-57-65.  The engineer said it looks like a bad temperature sensor, not a bad chip, especially if the unit was still hashing.  Even if it's running at 80C, this is 'within spec' for the v1.2 boards, according to them, and is nothing to worry about.

I'm still trying to find a way to disable the blinking, but until then, if the unit is hashing consistently, the LCD alarm is a cosmetic issue where they forgot to move a temperature check set point in the RPi firmware.