Stuff like this might be very handy, and will not violate warranty in case of SD-card malfunction. Blockchain file will grow more and more in the future, so one day, user might need to insert biger SD-card, and if it's unaccessable from the outside, it might make problems.
a) what is the advantage of having a secondary SD card slot over flashing the new FW image to your miner's primary SD card once you are done creating it?
b) the SD-card is almost read-only, i.e. only configuration changes are written, everything else goes into memory mapped temp file systems - with that, risk of wearing out the SD card is minimal
c) the FW image is tiny (like 30-50MB) and won't grow significantly in the future; the blockchain is not stored on the SD (for what?), so the smallest SD-card available is still orders of magnitude too big for the FW - we won't run into space issues
As for the board design: if you are not going to design your own board, you might want to contact one of the various projects that are working on A1 based mining gear.