I didn't have much time this week, since I was travelling (and got stuck in Dublin due to cancelled flights), but I did take a Pro Micro with me for experimenting, and after some poking around the LUFA project's directories, I found a ready to use USBtoSerial demo. It is in fact very similar to the Arduino code I was trying to get to run earlier, but this one comes with a specific version of the library that it works with.

The project is in the Projects/USBtoSerial directory, and all you need to change to make it work on the Pro Micro is the makefile — the usual MCU, BOARD and F_CPU changes. Then make, objcopy to make a hex file, and avrdude to flash it. And it seems to be working!

I didn't actually have a USB serial dongle to test it properly, but I shorted TX and RX pins to get to test the echo, and that seems fine. When I get back home I will try to program the ESP8266 with this, but I don't expect any problems.

Next step is getting the mass storage demo to work with my own flash chip — since the Leonardo board definition misses the header files for flash, I will need to write those — hopefully I will be able to figure them out from the files for other boards. When that works, I will need to figure out how to make it look for the filesystem at an offset, and what the offset is for MicroPython (or even better, how to find it).