This makes no sense.
It doesn't matter which tracker you use, when the poker sites update their clients and change things like hand history formats (even so much as an extra space, or comma, or dollar sign), or add new game types, or change the layout of the lobby (their table scanners use screen-scraping and OCR to read the tables), or any number of other changes that trackers rely on, then of course it requires a tracker update. Don't blame PT3/HEM for that, blame the poker rooms -- if PT3/HEM didn't release an update, then they would no longer work for those rooms anymore.
You'd be a lot more pissed if you paid for PT3/HEM and it only worked until the next poker client update, and they
didn't release an update. So you should be thankful that they're on top of updates like that.
And having used both of them, HEM is far superior to PT3 IMO. I started with PT3 when it was in beta, and ditched it after my first trial of HEM.
Oh, and not sure what you're implying by your "mad PC HEX skills." There's nothing much your "hex" skills can do for such an update, at least not one of any significance. Maybe for just a byte count or a character change, but why would you rather spend 10x-1000x the effort to figure that out than to just run a legit updater? Most client updates aren't something you can "hack" by running code through SoftICE/OllyDbg/WinDbg/IDA and patching bytes to short-circuit a serial number check. It requires actual logic changes. I can't help but think perhaps your copy is cracked and you're not paying for it -- and there's no excuse for that, especially for software that costs literally peanuts compared to the improvements it can bring to your game. PT3 and HEM paid for themselves within probably 2-3 weeks of my buying them.