Bearing what you've written in mind, how is the chumby 8 able to detect updated widget versions each time the control panel is manually restarted? Surely it wouldn't take a genius to copy this update-checking code across for use in the chumby classic.
To give you an indication of how annoying this delay is, none of the following workarounds have any effect. I've tried pressing the "Clear Cache" button in the 'pi' panel, rebooting the chumby classic and even downloading the widget's instance XML file via 'wget'.
In the latter case, the XML file that was downloaded to the chumby classic already contained the absolute (S3) 'movie' URL. For some stupid reason, the chumby classic's control panel (v2.8.80) thought it knew better and kept failing to load the relative URL from earlier.
At that point, I fantasised about pitching the chumby in the direction of the nearest brick wall at full speed. This sort of event would work out well for chumby industries, as people would be forced to upgrade from their recently smashed chumby classics to chumby 8s.