Personally I suspect this particular case might be virtually over.
Judges typically do not like their time wasted in court. However, the FBI made an unusual and urgent request to the court, and then put the court on hold, citing (in effect) a change in urgency, from immediate to “hold on.” I sense from that that the FBI is searching for a way out of the legal mess. I wonder if the third party is even real, or if it is real, is the way that it proposed to crack the iphone feasible.
In the long term, yes, I do agree with the author that the FBI might return. Most of LE folks are not exactly the smartest guys in the room. So even if they realize they made a mistake today, since they are not very bright they do not have much institutional memory and so they will follow the same line of thinking in the future that led them to this point today.
A catch: once another company touches the phone, Apple will refuse all involvement as they won’t know what was done to it.