pfSense

But suppose a user wants to update to a specific version - for example a stable release user might want to move to a beta to gain some very relevant feature. A person or business might also want to stay one version behind the cutting edge and move from x.y.1 to x.y.2 rather than the current x.y.3 in order to only move when they are happy a version is stable-for-them, even if it's "officially" been superseded by that point.

They might even be offline at the time, perhaps because the network is a "test" network with no WAN link, for security, or for many other reasons. At times updates have come in quick succession and the second of two updates might change something mission-critical for them and they want to only apply the first which has a patch relevant to them, rather than the second. (From memory this exact kind of situation happened around the time of the various SSL issues last year, some upgrades were crucial, some contained other patches too, so9me were irrelevant and not important to some users and others were crucial. Not likely to be unique.)

In brief, there are many good reasons and use-cases that people might not feel it suitable to always move to the pre-selected "cutting edge" as decided by the platform. Handling everything via pkg is good, but there needs to be a way for users who want to upgrade but to a specific version, to do so, I think. That's too important a feature with too many cases and reasons, to throw out of the window isn't it? Taking all choice in that area away is a huge step........ is surely can't be wise?