I don't really know what gtg does in regards the actual coding of Steem - I only know him from his posts in the witness group as gandalf and his 'steem in a box' system (which repeatedly failed for me and which caused me to lose 5 days attempting to figure out why.. thankfully, tim cliff's manual system worked first time).
I agree, in general it is best to update when advised to - unless there are very specific changes that you totally understand 100% and know 100% will not be a problem to not integrate. Given the ongoing problems with Steemit and the fact that their real causes have not been transparently revealed, I think it is a good idea to do everything possible from a witness position to mitigate that. While I have no specific reason to think that the problems are related to a failure to update or even to anything involved with steem itself - as a 'best practise' for system maintenance and debugging it is usually best to be running the latest version.
I am actually a trained system architect, designer and developer - so I am a bit more like Dan than an average coder and that's part of why I usually leave coding to others who see themselves as more development oriented than as designers/architects.. That said, I do have a few projects on Github for PHP.
Hmm, that must have been a frustrating experience with Steem in a box.
Steem in a box is from someguy123. His Steem in a box is awesome. Do you remember what was your problem? I faced one issue the last time I installed it. One script file need to be edited to change one address to link to a working seed node for the wallet to launch correctly.
Well that comment was suppose to have been posted days ago. I just noticed it not posted.
I found that although I followed the guides for Steem in a box 100% accurately, SteemD was repeatedly failing while syncing and nothing anyone suggested in the witness groups made any difference. The spec of the server was suitable and the kernel's version was suitable for Docker. I generally prefer doing things the manual way anyway, as I get to learn how the system functions rather than just pressing 'go' and backslapping myself for my genius. lol.
By building Steem manually and configuring the whole setup manually I was able to make the whole thing more tailored to my preferences, including taking the time to ping test each seed node and only use the ones with the quickest response times.
Cool! I did build it once from scratch for reasons I don't remember. Both way of doing have their advantages and disadvantages.
I don't know what could have been the problem with SIB. The only issue I had was with the wallet.
Take care my friend!
Generally I like to customise things a bit - but yeah, if the easy approach works then it is surely attractive.. In my case it just failed for unknown reasons.
Cheers!