You may want to consider bruteforcing your way into the phone:
Proper encryption is the only way to keep your personal data safe, if you lose your phone or it is stolen. I do agree, that users could be given the permission to not encrypt their data.
If you reflash your phone, you just need to login to your Jolla account. No need to buy a new license.
You don’t have to revert the phone back to Android. Just download the Sailfish OS image and Sony software binaries and place them in the same folder. Then you can continue from the step 6 onwards: Installing Sailfish X on XA2 using Linux - Jolla