So I finally had my converted payment chip installed today!
The process was honestly not as bad as I expected; no pain relief, inserted on the knife edge of my right hand. Thankfully my guy was absolutely spot on, and got the chip square into the pocket on the first try with minimal difficulty; I was concerned there would be some rummaging around inside to get it placed just right but nope, right under the stencil.
Tested the chip in packaging before installation, and had a good clean read, and the attached video is from right after the install. Near immediate success! As the swelling increased over the next couple hours, I tried it once more about 3 hours after and got almost as clean of a read again, no issues at all! The guy at McDonalds looked convinced that I hadnt actually paid 
Can’t fault the craftsmanship from Amal to be getting clean reads even with swelling, so very happy with the purchase.
Because I know the topic of UK payment chips is quite common, I’ll go ahead and run through the process for those considering it;
I went with the listed MuchBetter account, the fob cost £10 and was delivered in about a week. Off it went to Amal, and now it’s in me, it has a 5 year expiry, which now that I’ve experienced the install, is definitely worth the less than 1 minute of discomfort. There have been people saying that you can only make 5 purchases before a phone prompt to verify it’s you, but this hasn’t been my experience; I made several test purchases before installation to see what alignment worked best with the readers here, so I’m probably up to 10 purchases total now on it and haven’t been prompted at all.
So if you are UK based and, like me, can’t wait for a more permanent payment solution; this, so far, seems like a very successful 5 year stop gap!
