If you are going to be downgrading with E3 Flasher, get the solderless version since you then wouldn't have to deal with soldering stuff to your board. As for downgrading, downgrade down to 3.55 ofw first and then install a 3.55 cfw to QA flag your PS3.
Feel free to install any CFW of your choice after doing that, I recommend the new 4.65.2 Rebug Cobra REX CFW that just came out.
You won't necessarily need to use rebug 999 downgrader on your system, unless you want to downgrade your PS3 to a lower version after you already QA flagged your system and have updated past the 3.55 CFW. As for the links to 3.55 REX and other Rebug cfw, you can find those files on their official website.