I am happy to report that the Solution worked. Earlier, I mentioned that there were two possible solutions. I would either redo the whole program or, switch the ports. Coming back from Work exhausted, I tried the latter and yeap, it worked.
The next thing is to re-program the chip and already being tired, I was in no mood to desolder it, clean it up, reprogram and then solder it back to the flexiPCB. What I did was to use the ICSP route and yeah, I had a good night’s sleep after that.
