Apple Encryption Engineers, If Ordered to Unlock iPhone, Might Resist

No, it's not an 'odd idea'. The fact that the government can coerce you has lots of limits placed on it. Conscription and the draft have been abolished in most places in the developed world, contempt of court may get you jailed but will not - and can not - be used to force you to create something and eminent domain can only be used to take something away from you.

So yes, this would be a new low, it would mean that ordinary citizens that have broken no laws can be forced to create something that does not currently exist against their express desire (and maybe even against their capability, how do you even begin to check if someone should be able to do something).

It would definitely be a new low.

All the things you pulled into it have nothing to do with the matter at hand, those are other things that you may or may not agree with but they are not the same as being ordered by a judge to perform a job that you have no desire to if you yourself are not guilty of breaking any laws. It would be an abuse of power that to me is unprecedented in any modern society.

Well, it kind of does. Right now we're approaching Poe's law with the use of AWA to compel the writing of code, but we're still just barely in the realm of keep-a-straight-face-defensible (largely because the bulk of the population is less tech literate than is ideal). If even a few of Apple's key security engineers quit at the same time, then it becomes very easy for Apple to make the case that they literally cannot do what is asked anytime soon (how long for a new team to cold boot with a new codebase whose domain is cryptography and no one around to provide guidance/tribal knowledge?). In any sane universe this would show that the request has crossed the line into overly burdensome. It is very hard to justify massive penalties to incentivize compliance with something that Apple may or may not be able to do anytime soon [0].

So that would basically leave them the option of stopping the insanity or going after the individual engineers and compelling them, which opens up a whole other heap of lunacy which might have to get resolved before Apple would again be on the hook for action.

If the court then decides that it will compel the individual engineers who are now no longer Apple employees to work.... They're forcing labor from unwilling non-criminal citizens (13th?); they're compelling code, which is speech, and compelling association between the engineers and Apple who would presumably need to be compelled to rehire them because you can't make someone work for free (double 1st); as someone has mentioned they could institute a draft (??) but I'm sure there would be legal contest regarding conscripting specific individuals against their will and this would require the cooperation of congress, the military, the NSA, and it still wouldn't get them the thing they actually want which is precedent.

[0] From wikipedia: "the [fined] party is said to "hold the keys" to his or her own cell" which justifies the lack of a trial for civil contempt fines. If you cannot comply, you lack the ability to escape the fines, you are not receiving due process. I think this little corner of the law might actually be the bulwark that makes zero knowledge systems legally safe as well, though if you have an auto-update system you still would need the code-is-speech, cannot-compel-speech protections to round this out.

I'm pretty sure the FBI/Government has stated they will compensate Apple/any external consultants for their time at their usual rate.

This, and other techniques you describe, have been used by the FBI in the past but as far as I know only against the relatively powerless. It seems silly to think the FBI would do it in this case.

If the FBI started doing that to employees or ex-employees I suspect Apple would leave the U.S.

Why force it? To drop all pretext of what this really is, and reveal the US Government's actions as being that of the fascist monster it has become. After all, we've got the US military directly, intentionally spying on everything Americans do electronically. We're probably two or three steps or 'events' away from our first Caesar attempting to take permanent executive power. It's going to get a lot worse yet, just look how far they've come in a mere 15 years in their power grab. It's better to just stop pretending, here and now, regarding what's really happening.

It would be the Tiananmen Square for privacy in America.