Feature extraction from imagery would be awesome... I've kind of resigned myself to that being a pipe-dream at this point. But hey, someone is bound to figure it out.
While at GIS-T, I saw a quick presentation about SharedStreets. Their software is capable of generating a unique ID per roadway segment that will be consistent across datasets. Here's the basic concept:
They also offer OpenStreetMap data via their API, which apparently has already been assigned the SharedStreets IDs. I'm wondering if this could be leveraged to create a report of potential update locations on the LRS.
If you were to split your LRS network at each intersection and generate SharedStreets IDs, you could create something like a centerline sequence table that tracks which SharedStreets IDs belongs to which RouteId. I'm not super familiar with it, but I think OSM data has the last edit date for each segment associated with it. You could relatively easily query for all of the OSM updates within the last month, query the SharedStreets sequence table for the related RouteIds (and m-values if you'd like), then generate a simple PNG of the LRS overlaid on OSM to easily see what's changed.
There's still a lot of thinks and maybes in there, but if we could make something like this work, it would be awesome.