An unlocked phone is worth more than a locked one, meaning you can sell your phone for a higher price if you decide to change models in the future, as well as easily gift your unlocked phone to a friend or family member who is on a different network. ...
For some reason I got a patch for the 'Bell 8S' not the 'Bell 4S', anyways, since you said the MD5 hash has to match, I went with it. Device is not bricked, startsup fine, two startup beeps aswell, I can access it again, my proc/cmdline is now: mem=37M console=ttyAMA0,11...
Then if main image gets corrupted too, the device is bricked. So, main image and recovery were made to "watch after another". In particular, during boot of main image, recovery partition is checked, and if it doesn't contain "know good" image, it gets silently reflashed with copy of ...