Generally speaking I agree with you. However, in this specific case there were a couple of reasons we chose the path we did: 1. We had experienced bugs with th

Generally speaking I agree with you. However, in this specific case there were a couple of reasons we chose the path we did: 1. We had experienced bugs with the currently running release which we were fairly sure would manifest when we removed the damaged core from the network. These were primarily around MAC learning. 2. We had performed testing ourselves in a non-production environment and were already planning to take a network maintenance to update these switches in the next few days. Given those factors, we judged that introducing another variable in the new version was less risky than proceeding with the defects that we knew about in the existing version.