I agree on one hand, but on the other if you take this approach, eventually the number of changes will be enormous and the cause of any issue that crops up may

I agree on one hand, but on the other if you take this approach, eventually the number of changes will be enormous and the cause of any issue that crops up may be that much harder to pin point. If you keep somewhat up to date, it's smaller challenges each time. I suppose if they'd done the update into a test environment like a regular release then it's far more likely these issues would've come out there and it wouldn't have been so stressful.