It's not the letter; there were several that also behaved oddly as well but naturally I noticed mine right off the bat, and the previous minion had no trouble with sub-version letters. It seems to treat the version numbers as strings & just says a "hey, it's different" rather than, say, realizing that installed 1.3 higher than on-server 1.2 so don't upgrade, etc. (which, honestly, is all one might fairly expect given the lack of version number control structure in addons).
I understand about the ads and making it hideable when needed makes it much, much more palatable. Moreso if you don't use ones that are noisy or animated.
And two whole happy bananas for a dark theme.