Sorry, but “zypper dup” is sometimes needed, precisely because it is a rolling distribution.
Sometimes packages get renamed or version numbers get changed to incompatible values. And “zypper dup” can handle that, while “zypper up” cannot.
There are some plymouth issues in recent updates. I have not yet installed 20170129. With 20170128, plymouth did not prompt for the LUKS encryption key. I had to use “nosplash” on the boot command. But I am not seeing signs of plymouth crashing.