I understood, will report as you suggested later today. Too many balls
in the air right now.
The display and initial-setup should come up even with the module
blacklisted (perhaps not on workstation, not tested there), you lose some
performance but it should be very usable.
I did want to state my success following Paul Whalen's remark, in case
others face the same problem. I do not think the desktop is "very
usable" but the important result is the system can be configured with
users, etc. Access via ssh works fine, no vc4 problems there.