To be clear, were you using DKMS? It's not clear at all to me if that's what the OP is talking about using (he mentions scripts in the nvidia installer), but DK

To be clear, were you using DKMS? It's not clear at all to me if that's what the OP is talking about using (he mentions scripts in the nvidia installer), but DKMS has worked quite well for me for a long time when I needed to keep out-of-tree drivers up to date. Of course, if your distro tracks the latest kernel upgrades in a frequent fashion (e.g. ArchLinux) then it's more problematic, since API changes in the kernel will actually cause compilation failures. But actually making a rebuild happen? Easy. Debian derivatives tend to have stable kernel versions for years and years, so DKMS works quite well here for modules that are out of tree (another example is ZFS on Linux).