Apparently it's been a really long time since I've done TI stuff, but I haven't forgotten about it.

I was looking into the internal function "subst_reloads". This code modifies instructions to do register replacement and expression simplifications determined elsewhere. I thinking that I could use it to figure out how to restructure expressions involving word-byte conversion.

No dice. That function only replaces individual operands, typically replacing memory locations with hard registers. To do this properly, I'll need to muck around with the rtx records directly and manually restructure instructions. Needless to say, I'm not really excited to do this. Unfortunately, I need to find a solution here and all other attempts have failed.