I think cappra summed it up well.
There have been several cases where people had an excessively difficult time getting the firmware installed, and I've told Outlaw directly that I'd be strongly in favor of them trying to work with Etronics on a better firmware loader (the one being used by the 990 is the same one used by Sherwood), but there have been a lot of 990's shipped out and a great many of those have been updated painlessly.