Version coming with armv7-lirc-osmc is about 5 years old.
Later versions have a very useful option “–update” for adding buttons to existing config without remote recalibration.
You can bump and build this yourself and PR
There are lots of changes, including to configuration files which is why we use the version that we do
At my desk now so can cover this in more detail. Remote support is really important in OSMC, and I’m reluctant to bump the version as this could break things quite badly. Instead, I’d like to keep this relatively static and only update if absolutely necessary. I haven’t seen many compelling reasons to update the version. The configuration files are much different, which would mean we’d need to update every remote configuration file we have.