Right, this is getting a bit confusing for me, but never mind, I appreciate all the information.
So to recap, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to update firmware to the Nov 2014 release aside from the fix to the web UI, which fix can be applied by a single line via ssh.
Am I correct in this or have I missed something that is obvious to you?
I'm not exactly sure if there's any improvements other than the webui fixes. Kind of your choice on whether you prefer to fix the webui or the pic firmware as both appear to have the same end result as far as I can tell however I haven't tested performance differences extensively. I have yet to check if cgminer was updated between those versions either so you may want to do a more detailed comparison.