Wow, what a lot of unfounded ramblings!
Chesh's assertions about rebug were always suspect, and have been shown to be nonsense now. Yes, it did enable people to download pretty much anything from the PSN with fake CC numbers. No, this is not the reason the PSN was down, nor does it seem to have been the attack vector.
The SSL 'crack' you're talking about was not used. There was no modified version of sslsniff, nobody was using wildcarded, null-stringed or any other clever certificate hacking methods to get online.
You don't need to do that when you have full access to the client, you simply drop in your own new Certificate Authority and hey-presto, you can MITM the connection really easily with a variety of pieces of software, including several custom ones (which is what happened). Then you simply rewrite bits of the version information in-flight. This has been possible since the first write-enabling homebrew emerged for cracked PS3 systems around last October but didn't really take off until around February this year as a way to get back online with custom firmware.
However with Rebug I don't think even this was necessary as the dev PSN did not do anything like the number of version checks that the retail PSN did.
All of which is now beside the point as we know that the attack took place using known vulnerabilities in unpatched web servers.
Oh, and the theory about a botnet - also very unlikely. Since the 3.56 update the CFW community has been unable to create custom firmwares that will get past the enhanced FW integrity checks.