Maybe it's time to see if we can get vendors to adopt fwupd, or something which can rely on the same dataset, as a standard cross-platform mechanism for updating firmware on devices which can conceivably be supported.
I imagine it would take a considerable burden off of those vendors; marketing it as such has a decent chance of success. Not sure if Richard Hughes (thanks for assembling my ColorHUG by the way, if I go back to work in the next month or two I'll definitely get a ColorHug+, since I'm interested in verifying open source scanner calibration workflows) wants to make a living maintaining a firmware updater, though. It'd probably have to be somebody else.