So there are holes there already. What is the shiny metal looking stuff in the hole on the left? A threaded insert or remnants of a rivet?

Did any of the CF repair places you talked to go into any detail about what they do?

However still with glass work on my sailboat, I found that even it you do a piss-poor job the first time, you can always come back and rip it out and do a slightly less piss-poor if not perfect job the next time.

There have been DIY'ers here in the past that messed around with actual CF repair kits and seemed to do a very good job.