Mms proposed updates

These are my proposed updates, mostly reflecting the things that I've been doing without documenting them. Feel free to tear them apart. I'll annotate changes that I think need explanation.
I think this boils down to which risk you think is greater:
1) That a new patch version will break your app
or
2) That your app will be more secure/performant by generally running the latest patches.

IME patch-level regressions are rare compared to major/minor updates, which is why I'm more lenient in upgrading them. Again, this assumes that the gem obeys semantic versioning.