I'm guessing the Loader (ie. a bootstrap) isn't upgradeable... or at least isn't upgradeable as part of a firmware update
I agree - they probably /can/ update it OTA but it would be an unreasonable risk. It would be interesting to know what the differences are between the three versions but they are possibly just updates to the test bench code used in the factory.
More interesting would be to understand the differences in the 2nd stage bootloader on the HD model, although I suspect the main change might have been just the kernel's flash location.
Am I missing something? 1.02.27 isn't an "official" release yet so installing this could effectively invalidate your warranty or cause other problems? Wasn't there a bug in 1.02.026 and that's why it was never officially released? has this been fixed in 1.02.27?
I don't think it would invalidate your warranty but yes it's only posted on the beta site. I would imagine that they will do what they did for the Foxsat which is leave it there for a couple of weeks before pushing an OTA and making it available on their main site.
The bug in 1.02.26 that I saw mentioned on myhumax.org was related to audio description IIRC and the release notes for 1.02.27 do indicate that there are fixes in that area.