It's fascinating how many great stories there are from this wild west period of the computer industry, thanks for a great writeup.

I have to pick a nit with footnote 10 though, "There's no need for a processor accessing bits in parallel to be little endian" – there is when your data bus is narrower than the address bus, such as an 8-bit CPU performing indexed or relative 16-bit addressing. The simple pipelining of the little endian 6502 allows it to calculate the lower half of the target address while it fetches the upper half from memory, saving a cycle compared to the big endian 6800.