A tad industrial perhaps, but it would work...
Indeed.
What about the control pot? Is that connected in a similar way or is it hard wired to the PCB?
Even if it was, you could add eepots or similar in shunt and series arrangements to take control of it in a fairly easy to reverse mod.
(it has to be said it took quite a few hours of research to find a boiler that could do all these tricks out of the box (i.e. weather compensation, split temperature operation, multiple zones etc)