Upgrading NopCommerce Needs To Be Thought About

I have been using nop for years now, and those who have seen me on here will know I really like whats been done with nop but keep banging on about multi-store on nopcommerce and how its a big lacking feature for most people.

However, I'd like to discuss the upgrades. For me and a lot of other devs I have spoken to in digital agencies here in the UK, one of the main stumbling blocks is how hard it is to upgrade nop once you have built a site.

If you look at other apps like Umbraco or Magento or wordpress, they have VERY easy upgrades in comparison. Nop is now moving towards v2.8, but still no thought has been put into making an easy upgrade path through revisions (i.e. 2.2 to 2.3, 2.4 to 2.5 etc...)

Just wondering what other people on here thought about it and what we can do to make the process less painful.

Need to even consider something like being able to copy over the top of an existing installation an unpacked full or upgrade ZIP and have it automatically upgrade.  DotNetNuke does something similar.  While DNN has its gliches, I miss this about DNN with a great deal of other software I use, including nop.  DNN will merge Web.config, run SQL scripts, even remove files that no longer belong in the Web directory.  When they converted from VB.NET to C#, they actually wrote as part of the upgrade to remove all of the extraneous .vb files that were no longer needed.

I am about to embark on an upgrade from nop 1.9 to the latest (likely from one version to the next) and not looking forward to it.