I have a first gen pair of Airs that I absolutely love, except for the lack of open-ness. I think that I’ll have to try dumping the firmware and writing my own at some point - likely when I have to replace the frames (have had to CA glue and tape the right arm three times now; I’m rough on my electronics). The teardowns that I’ve seen show that they contain almost entirely common off-the-shelf components (MCU, IMU, I/O expander, etc), so, shouldn’t be too bad to implement via Arduino or Rust.
The thing that drives me most crazy though is the lack of forethought on the Beam. It does it’s job great but they didn’t bother to have a dedicated power-in or support high enough wattage to run it off of external power. It’s absolutely maddening to have to recharge it 3/4 of the way through work. Think I’ll be modifying it to add a USB-PD input for power.