Have you considered a dash mat of a color to match the carpet? Blue IS going to crack from the UV. Mine was badly cracked and I covered it with such a dash mat that was at least more acceptable than a dash with all the cracks.

The job looks and feels more formidable than it really is. It took me about 3 hours to pull a good dash from a wreck at a Pick N Pull, and most of that was because I had to do it around a steering wheel I couldn't remove. It took less than 45 minutes to install in the car. You learn quite a bit when you pull two dash boards. Replacement then becomes more tedious than complicated. It's pretty hard to connect anything incorrectly simply because all the connections are different. It's just because there are so many that it's tedious.