Well, after 48 hours of searching the web, asking around in various IRC channels and fiddling with a lot of files and settings I was rather skeptical when looking at this url...
but it seems that finally did the trick, thanks a lot Rich!
What I want to achieve is to be able to switch between different drivers available for same device which used to be a piece of cake with the old pcmcia utils by changing the "bind drivername" line in /etc/pcmcia/config.
Not marking this as solved yet, as I wouldn't exclude there might be a more convenient and/or more permanent way to deal with this.