Is it really so? I have 10 extra applications and there are more than 100 (?) in Maemo Application Catalogue. What a tremendous work to rewrite them! Very bad if so!

I understand that probably some extra programming - may be complicated - work is needed to preserve Extra Applications in memory during the re-flash. Safer too?
I think it's not too heavy to store those deb-files somewhere and re-install them when you see that the new firmware itself works as expected.