But they've got a point. Even if it takes "only 10 minutes" to upgrade, there have been so many new versions and so many security issues that it gets kind of old after a while. Especially if you have multiple sites all running it.
svn update
I'm in the process of upgrading all of them to 2.8.4 and installing the necessary plugins and params in the config file so they can all be "auto updated" in the future. I plan on having my VA manage them from there.
However sometimes strange things happen - for example, I auto upgraded one of our sites the other day and the whole thing broke and only rendered a blank page, so it's entirely possible my VA will break one or more sites even using the auto upgrade functionality.