There has been some discussion of what folks would like to see in firmware updates to the 990, but I think they've been pretty scattered around so it's not hard to miss them. There's a thread in the "new product suggestions" forum, but it is focused on what a successor to the 990 should include - not really what we're looking at here.

Wolverine has an excellent point about item #1 - the 990 behaves much like the 950 did in regards to remembering the last mode used for a given audio format on an given input. The 1070 also shares this, although I think it took some software revisions (released around the time the 970 was launched) to fully implement it. That's why I do exactly what Scott suggested to Wolverine - my CD input is assigned to the digital input from my DVD player and is set up to use stereo with upsampling for listening to CD's, while the DVD input applies surround processing to the same digital input.