Since most of my maintenance is off peak hours, this makes total sense! Spending only 45 minutes of development instead of 6 hours with the trade off of 10 minutes downtime during off peak hours makes total sense. Thanks for the post with a relevant example.
This is something I've discussed with my teams on a few occasions. Performing updates to applications usually ends up consisting of a hacky "down for maintenance, back in 10..." page put up by hand.
Seems like every app I use has had downtime, heck, even Pivotal Tracker had some last week, so why is it something people disregard / ignore as a topic?