Current V2 builds also don't use USB although this can be seen as an advantage if you use it for charging most of the time.
Memory mods are not "strange hacks", they are done all of the time. THE V2 DOES NOT EVEN HAVE THE PINS/BALLS ON THE CPU TO USE EXTERNAL MEMORY, which means even if I had full access to all of the balls, there would still be no way to increase its total ram!
Theoretically I can also increase the amount of flash, not just on the fuze, but also on most other players that use internal flash (most notably the V1 and V2 nanos which could benefit from a lot more). This might also increase the speed of transfers with the right flash chip.
This gets very hairy though because of flash controller chips and the need to transfer data to the replacement chips. The flash chip needs to be compatible with the controller used in the player, I would need to be able to pick them up in quantity for a good price, and I would need a foolproof and efficient way to copy data from one chip to another. I might upgrade my Gen1 nano eventually to 8 or 16GB of flash but I rarely use it since I prefer the fuze and like the microsd slot feature (I can write in parallel to as many memory cards as I want but transfers to the player are stuck at little over 3MB/s).