As Bill mentioned updating LM's can be important, many of the updates fix bugs or add other desirable features besides sound.
I don't know if you bought a CI-1 or not but many of us bought one purely for doing updates. Updating 40 LM's using a CI-1 shouldn't be too painful; plonk a piece of track and a 12v power supply next to your computer and update a few each night while your surfing, doing emails etc. You might be surprised and be through them quicker than you expect.
Edit: Thinking about this I wonder how hard it would be for Ring to develop an "all responding modules" or "all detected in the controller" update method. I had a pager at one stage that received updates OTA (Over The Air), they would simply push the update out over the air and each pager (thousands of them) that was powered would receive and update. Would make updating 40 modules a breeze
- Tim