As I watch paint dry while the latest KiCad library 50MB ppa is downloaded, it seems that KiCad should use a smarter library updating system, either rsync based or something like the LTSpice sync. This would mean that only the affected library gets downloaded, saving drastically on server bandwidth and time. For example, the latest update will be due to the addition of one part to the Linear library
When I use GitHub for the 3D models, it seems to update blindly overwrite the files in whatever library is selected.