yea I can feel ya there, course as a side option you could install a local lamp package and make a clone site locally to fiddle with without borking the public site (an when you get it all worked out you do a current database conversion and upload all the files quick n smooth)

I am pretty sure there was a 2x version of the same idea, but I really dont know where, i think there is a whole subsite for phpbb2 somewhere in that domain, v3 did not sit well with v2 users for a while, but most of the pain is smoothed over