The worst part of all of this, I think, is that there's really no downside to Tracfone providing an official stock firmware release that can be installed through Kies.
I've resolved to the fact that for whatever reason they don't see a reason to update these phones. Obviously they don't understand how much value these phones would have to potential customers with an OS update.
I can also vouch for removing the two proxy addresses in the apn settings to bypass data throttling. I used APN Manager to do this and have downloaded several GB worth of data (probably around 5 or 6) since then.
Sent from my SGH-S959G using xda app-developers app