The reason you would have not noticed any problems when updating, is that your client already had a config file. The config file failed to generate on a clean install.

Regarding the nodes, the client will only connect to a maximum of 8 by default. This is essentially extreme redundancy. However, seeing as the above instructions to make a config file are just a simple copy-past, I was not too worried about having all the nodes listed. The main motivation was to not be partial to a specific set of nodes.