No.

And I've heard from people who modded that they updated and it didn't affect them in the slightest.

You mean you think it's possible that they could screw up on the coding such that it will fuck up the wrong systems, but that this same terrible, poorly written coding could miss some consoles it was intended to get is hard to believe?

Deterrent.

I'm actually inclined to believe it was on accident, but it isn't too much a stretch of the imagination for me to believe they'd do something this stupid on purpose.

Ah good, we're on the same page then. You were acting like it was absolutely on purpose, with anyone believing otherwise having to be mentally unstable. Maybe this isn't how you meant it, but that's how you came off. To me, anyway.

I was under the impression that it usually found and deleted the mod, but only sometimes fucked up the system after this. Its kind of amazing to think that they would detect the mod and then not brick a system if that's what they were intending to do. Its hilariously easy to mess up a machine like that when you have the access and knowledge of the system that the folks making these updates have.

How to reboot a nintendo Wii console that has software Mod:

Tell memory to fill 0x00 to Ex09.

I THINK that's the format code we use on the RVT readers. We made a script at work that formats the wii console memory remotely if it detects save data on the machine.

If a collection of game testers with little to no programming experience can, over the course of 6 months of interacting with testing consoles, write their own script to format a console's memory, [insert implications.]

Of course this is all heresay. It could just be an accident. It could have been a lucky guess on my part. Clearly a company that sees mod chips as "I like to play downloaded games and not give you my money" is going to be totally cool with being extra special careful not to brick your console.

The part of the update that deletes the mod and the part of it that is causing the problem are two different parts. One part deletes homebrew. One part exists to prevent homebrew from running, regardless of whether you have modded or not. The latter has a bad habit of corrupting the boot file, which is more likely with modded consoles, though whether that is intentional or not is anyone's guess, and we don't have any solid numbers for how many modded/unmodded consoles this is effecting.

This alone tells me the bricking is not intentional.
This blows away any doubt that might have been bumming around in the far reaches of my mind.

Not really. This removes the modding part could be there for modded ones that don't get bricked, since the new boot programming will keep the current homebrew stuff from working. Basically, "This will fry their consoles, and if it doesn't, they won't be able to use the homebrew anyways." Like I said, I'm inclined to think it's an accident, but I'm not putting anything past them.

If they detect the mod, there is no possible way for them to fail at bricking the console. All they have to do is load a bad boot file. Its done the second the file starts writing. There's a million other ways, but this one seems relevant since they could easily pass it off as a bad update, since they were updating the boot file anyway. This didn't happen though.

The existence of any number of consoles that had homebrew before and had it deleted, but still work after the update completely disproves the theory.

As I said, I have a hard time believing Nintendo would do this accidentally considering every other update in the past just overwrote the mod code with little to no problems (I think). I mean it's even in the agreement you accept when you get the new download - "It might conflict with this new software and as such will be removed."

To argue against my previous statements, this is the same company that had the German policy information when accepting the PALfrench [Regarding the Online T&R I mean.].

It was only for the span of one update, but still. O_o

You think its hard to believe that they are accidentally bricking both modded and unmodded consoles because they simply removed the mods perfectly in the past. This does not connect for me.