There is no reason I would imagine for 99% of their target market to need to upgrade, and the remaining 1% is capable of doing the upgrade themselves. The package (Perl) is meant to run limited services for their needs not the end user. I have been running a smoothwall box for months and have been very happy with it, even on my weak hardware (AMD 75, 32MB, 400MB HD) it has provided the function claimed by the producer.

If you are trying to do development or production work on a firewall I really have to ask why?

If you want to parse logs or manage the system do it from a machine behind the firewall and not on the firewall.