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.
I do not think that cgminer was updated in the Nov firmware ... but could be wrong. Aside from that, since they made a dog's dinner out of the pic_firmware, I can not for the life of me see else-where performance enhancements could have been made.
Here's an interesting thought, would it not be nice if you wrapped one good bin file firmware update for us mere mortals? Here I mean one that has the correct and properly working hex file plus a working filesystem. that would be nice.
On another note, I managed to extract that hex file from one of my S3's (keep it for a rainy day) using MinGW on Windows. When I call file on the hex, it says it is ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators! I am tempted to open it up in notepad .....