I read in the past the differences but I am starting to wonder more and more..

In 3.x it was that install used one sql script not incremental, however that is no longer the case.

Upgrade does not install or upload any core modules but I wonder if that is best practice.    Why does it matter?   Considering the install only installs the html and links module anyhow, the difference is very minimal.   Given the recent change in html editors, this adds to the reasoning that it should at least upload it.

Right now, there are only two minimal differences that I am aware of and no FAQ on the subject which makes me think there must be more confusion just by having an extra download.

Thoughts?

good point but that only worked because there wasnt a web.config change and you didnt have any special settings...

the install could be done the same..  remove web.config and force the rename of release.config

I just dumped 4.5.2 install on top of 4.3.7 without any problems...  ( oh well actually it left some ftb and dotnetnuke.html*dll in the bin folder which created ambigous defs and brought the site down ) .. not sure if upgrade would have handled that or not ..   4.4.x upgrades to 4.5.1 didnt have problems like that ...