Apple Mac Pro 6,1 macOS 10.13 EFI update bricks VMware vSphere from HCL

Apple,

This is not cool for any high end product. I purchased a Mac Pro 6,1 with the sole intention of using this under the VMware vSphere HCL (the ONLY supported Apple product that permits virtualization under EULA). During installation, I am presented at the end with "No Supported Network Adapters Found" and my only option is to outright quit the installation of ESXi 6.5 Update 1. VMware Knowledge Base

Upon further review of a Duo Security article on Apple's failure to properly deploy EFI updates nor notify end users that they failed (even though the user clearly believes they installed all security updates), I found that my firmware was not as expected. (I speculate this was due in part to Apple addressing CVE-2017-5853/5854) https://duo.com/blog/the-apple-of-your-efi-mac-firmware-security-research

Additional research of the vmkernel.log indicated that there were still issues with AHCI and the SSD. , I reviewed the firmware installed on this model with that against VMware HCL. This unit (which shipped with High Sierra) has MP61.0120.B00 which was NOT disclosed to VMware (why would I want to run Fusion when I could run many Mac Pro models redundantly with high availability ONLY with vSphere/ESXi/vMotion/vSAN?).

I also reviewed this solution,How to: Mac Firmware Restoration - yet I cannot downgrade this firmware! This is just unacceptable that I cannot rollback Apple's mistakes. I don't feel anyone would desire to toss down max dollars for your premium product and be forced to run an Apple OS with a type 2 hypervisor (Fusion) (and/or Xcode). I would much rather have enterprise features work as expected and run 10.11, 10.12, 10.13 and whatever next release ALL AT THE SAME TIME - so I can test each of these for security independently of each other. This is especially important for productsecurity@apple.com since there is ZERO bug bounty for macOS. If you really want people to help you, you're going to need to immediately get engineering to help us.

What do Apple Mac Pro users need to do in order to remedy this? Must I totally brick the system and request some "genius" replace it outright? Does this make any business sense to anyone, does anyone have any feedback as to what EFI version you actually have installed on your Mac Pro and additionally, has anyone successfully downgraded their ROM to a FULLY supported version across all vendors (i.e. MP61.88Z.0116.B17.1602221600)?

Comments welcome, both by the community and Apple. (Additional note, please also provide VMware HCL a VIB for your D300/500/700 GPU as vDGA for passthrough. What good does Apple do being a member of OpenCL when we cannot run those applications within anything (they appear according to some users and do passthrough but OpenCL calls fail). This is not acceptable to wait until 2019 for Apple to release another Mac Pro and abandon this one either nor does the iMac Pro even add value here because it's not practical to have 3 or 4 of these running in tandem with an HA workload spread across them. Please Apple, do some serious QA and provide @lamw and team something to work with before I change my mind and go back to using PowerEdge R6xx series (plus you'll have all the hackintosh folks again, because Apple is forcing them to do so).