I think we're playing a game of "telephone" here -- dCiSo hit me up on IRC and said that he had received an email asking "have you seen or worked with the new Wii NAND yet? Some people are saying that you can no longer dump it with homebrew apps or use any type of homebrew with it".
This is a surprise to me, but only partially. We know that the latest updates to IOS not only fixed the fakesigning bug everywhere, but that they went back and fixed it in boot2v4 (where it doesn't affect anything) and a new boot1, present on Wiis made within the last few months. So when someone asks me "hey did you hear about the new Wiis that can't be hacked", I think to these Wiis that come with fixed versions of boot1, boot2 and IOS. I wrote back "did you see this?
http://hackmii.com/2009/02/bootmii-and-the-new-boot1/ ... I don't know why the HBC wouldn't install using the Twilight Hack, though ... next time you run into someone like that, ask them to try to come find me on IRC"
(Nintendo did finally figure one thing out -- when they release a whole bunch of changes all at once, I / we don't have time to go through all of them and figure out what they changed and what bugs they fixed.)
So, that explains why it's hard to dump the flash (/dev/flash is blocked in most or all of the installed IOSes). I would expect the Twilight Hack to still work (at least on menu 3.4 and earlier; maybe they will fix it right the third time). I would expect the HBC installer to still work, since it uses an undisclosed exploit (for this very reason). I don't know anything about whether "softmods" will work -- dCiSo didn't ask me about that, and honestly, I've never looked too closely at them.
Hopefully that answers the question of "what does boot1 have to do with softmods"? Answer: Nothing, but the new boot1 implies that Nintendo is getting better (or more serious) at fixing bugs.
