Just for completeness's sake, I figured I would post this here, but because I didn't give y'all advance notice, I'm making it an unpaid post.
I tried underclocking the BBPLL (Baseband PLL) inside an ESP8266, which slows all of its peripherals, INCLUDING the baseband circuitry. This royally messes with all of the RF circuitry, but somehow the ESPs can still talk to each other despite horribly violating the 802.11 standards!
https://github.com/cnlohr/esp8266oddclock