The GM team here seems to be falling into the same mold as GMs from all previous servers as far as keeping the community informed goes. If there's going to be a 1+ hour maintenance... tell the players why or what's going on.
DRG has a twitter no? Isn't that supposed to keep us up to date with day-to-day things? Haven't been updated in weeks.
So what kind of main takes 4+ hours? Hopefully not for the small things you listed. Why can't new features/fixes be tested before you bring the servers down for maint so all you need to do is a server reboot/patch? It looks to me like you're coding things while server's down or something. Prove me wrong by keeping up dated but now everyone is just confused and annoyed.
If a GM is having problem with some aspect of the update... tell us so we don't think you're off drinking and just forgot to boot up the server before leaving.