Nice to know... but...
Since I seem to have sensitive fingers ("Safe Cracker Mode") I don't find the stock setup particularly hard to use.
Since your modification obviously voids your manufacturer's warranty, I think I'll wait until my warranty period has run out before I change anything inside the scope. (I appreciate your performing the experiment though... it's always better to learn from someone else's mistakes, or successes, before risking a warranty, I say.)
But then, I'm not bothered by the fan "noise" either, since I can't hear it over all the other equipment fans running in my laboratory/bedroom. (I even bought a quieter fan for my scope before it was delivered, based on all the complaints I read here. Imagine my chagrin when I discovered the actual fan noise was not bad at all. From all the complaints about the fan, I expected something like a leaf-blower noise. The quiet fan still sits in its original box...)
(If I need to enter some long string of information, like the "unlock" code, I do it using SCPI commands via telnet over the LAN connection, and I copy-paste from a text file where I know I have the proper sequence stored.)