Good editorial, but I'm in total disagreement with the final sentence:
Above all, however, no matter what your deployment mechanism for updates, you need to be sure that any data you include is at the quality level you'd expect would be delivered to you.
I've been in the situation where if the updates I allowed to be shipped out were similar quality to the stuff that was delivered to me the company I would have failed to do my job - I had to be very sure that what we shipped as of higher quality than what we received, so discovering faults in what was shipped to us and devising work-arounds to eliminate those faults (sometimes reverse engineering stuff - where that wasn't illegal) in order to work out how to work around problems and sometimes (again when legal) modifyiing stuff we'd received by replacing some of it by our own idea of what it needed to be before shipping it to our customers.
Tom