We've got kind of a mishmash of solutions that depend on the application.  Most of our customers have a local salesman who calls on them, and most of our salesman who have PLUS+1 customers have the Service Tool on their laptop.  That along with Teams for screenshare can get us through some goodly amount of testing.

Our customers who require the most heavy duty support also tend to have at least one technician or engineer who is technical and patient enough to be walked through getting the free version of GUIDE with which also include the full version of the Service Tool.  However, this has become much more difficult since the only way to get that stuff is through the Update Center, but it's just like an annual hassle.  Generally, if one of our customers has a machine that needs programming support then they're sending one of those guys out to the machine because there's often hydraulic/machine support needed too.  The slow improvement of the CS product line is beginning to help mitigate some field visits.

One major critical step that I learn some years back is that you can create log and parameter pages without having a controller connected in case you haven't tried that.  You can load the .lhx as a diagnostic file into the Service Tool in Offline Mode and set the ECU to that file basically.  Then you can add and tweak parameter and log pages to your .p1d file which you can then send out to a customer/technician.

As Fredrick said you can set these parameters through a memory address but depending on your usage, this can use up the write limit on those memory blocks.

For all control blocks I know of, you can set the values through regular wire variable. The method we use is using a value-connect component, with an initialize component. This works well for us because we have generic constants for parameters that will get live updates to tune the value in a calibration.

Tor, thanks for checking on that.  Personally, 2024 works better for me anyway, as I'm all booked up for 2023. 

You can use the Stretch command.

Maybe the controller takes a false ground over the CAN network, but if you break the ground wire, I would expect the controller to malfunction in a random way. 
I'm glad the controller survives this at all.  Missing one of the 3 12 volt wires is bad if the current draw is too high on the remaining pins, but sinking a current over whatever is left doesn't seem healthy.