After quite some time, I've gotten around to making an Arduino based remote control that iterates through the 10,000 combinations. It takes around 8-9 hours to go through them all and has worked twice for me.

I'll try and post the hardware fritzing diagram, and the sketch code that it uses (I need to simplify it a bit as I made mine with a display - which isn't really needed).

I think the kids have changed the sorting of the main program list to Alphabetical - this puts "Enter KidsZone" as the first item - so if your remote control gets squashed on the couch, or played with - it's more likely to be accidentally locked out.

Possibly also worth noting that there might be an option to issue the commands via the ssh session - but I wasn't able to find my IP to connect while I was in KidsZone.