Oh happy day!
Some interesting developments with the wet camera saga. Once arriving home I put the camera in front of the heater for a few days. Unfortunately the rear display still did not work. Just out of curiosity I connected the camera to the HDMI inputs on the TV. Lo and behold the camera display was shown on the TV as you would expect it to.
This gave me hope that the video processor was still working and it was merely the display that had failed. With this new hope I ordered a replacement display from the vendor on eBay. It arrived in a little more than a week and today I installed it. The operation was significantly more delicate than I would’ve anticipated. In fact the very thin ribbon cable you can see in some of the photos actually splits into two directions, one for the display itself, and another for the back light. These two very fine ribbon cables needed to be soldered together, but that’s no challenge for big J.
Long story short, it works splendidly well and there is much rejoicing from me tonight.