If you have multiple V5 brains with broken USB ports, you can still try to upgrade their firmware to the latest version if the ports themselves are broken, but PCB traces are still intact. You can see USB port on the right side of the original image:
Pictures of Internals of V5 components - #13 by technik3k
If soldering wires for an external USB connection is not an option, you can try to use a custom PCB probe fixture, similar to this one:
The hope is that once VEX releases new version of firmware that allows future updates wirelessly or via SDCards, you will no longer depend on broken USB connectors.