Mesa firmware versions and updating

RNZ wrote:

i why?
ii why?
iii why?
iv if you do need to:

Why would I NOT want to have the latest FW ? I'm confused as to why you would ask "why?".

Yeah i thought that was not the best answer as i understand why you are asking, but with Mesa there is no need to update firmware ever, changing firmware can be done based on your needs easily, i have a 7i92 and a 6i25 that i have flashed over 50 times doing all kinds of testing.
Also Mesa downloads will contain whatever firmware is available for that card, for some over 20 versions with different combos of stepgen/PWM/encoders/IO etc to choose from.
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Just to be clear, i have no affiliation with Mesa, i used them once on a retrofit and got even specialised firmware from them in a day for exactly what i needed, from then on i exclusively use Mesa as they are extremely reliable, support is absolutely perfect as you can see above (PCW is the owner of Mesa), and by now i have over 80 Mesa boards on industrial machines in use daily, never had a single failure.

this has become a race on "how many posts i find by the time i post this"

RNZ wrote:

To be clear, I have a Raspberry Pi 5 and have been having ethernet stability issues when connecting to my 7i96s card. Thus during debugging I want to make sure I have the latest / most stable software versions installed.

Those are RPI issues, never ever Mesa issues.
The only things that sould cause those issues with a Mesa ethernet board are bad cable (rarely) and bad 5V supply (very often).
Otherwise, always, always host PC issues with latency due to power saving/sleep states/hyperthreading/thermal throttling/failing power supply/failing memory/failing hard drives.
On RPI i would look for power supply and thermal throttling, then follow one of the many howto's for setting whatever RPI needs to have set.
Sorry but i do not use RPI, so can not help much.