Yes, it's to remove debug code and change crop growing. I can imagine Aikar typing away madly on his computer while Max looks over his shoulder.
When I need to push a server update out I push all at same time otherwise it takes up like 15 minutes of my time juggling between terminal windows and copy/pasting commands left and right :/ Its really only 1 minute of the warning and 30s to reboot, so no reason to switch servers anyways. ... except for this reboot where things went bad and it was down for a bit >< Crop changes did not go live, will look into the issue more.