Oh man. I know the feeling. Sometimes you go into a day expecting it to just be a regular update and suddenly everything goes wrong. Sounds like the hardware update wasn't playing nice with the way the game DB works, resulting intermittent saving issues.
As a player I would hope that these hardware updates were tested on a test environment first. But it seems like it took a while to start seeing problems. So maybe it couldn't be known in advance. Any time you need to update anything on a 10 year old game, it can go sideways very easily. Old does not play nice with new.
So a big time 'yikes', followed by an 'I understand', concluded with 'but I'm disappointed'.