Finally rooted. Rating of these machine is seriously misleading. While I would rate difficulties of user 4/10 and root 2/10 the foothold goes up to 11.
I think misleading ratings are detrimental to new users because they would expect something much simpler. I wonder how many newcomers just said F–it and dropped their interest altogether. Just compare this machine to Nest or OpenAdmin on one (easy) hand and Doctor and Blackfield on the other(hard). I understand that this is debatable coz what we know is easy and what we don’t know is hard. But c’mon - chaining exploits while installing full G***** suite is not f… easy.
To end this long rant-thank you @0xc45 for enjoyable machine and great learning experience. Looking forward to your next machine. Also thanks to @waza for great hint that allowed me to proceed.