Try as I might, I couldn't reverse engineer the trick to the crazy amount of upgrades. I'm really curious to find out what the secret is! (I did manage to find a buggy object with a broken upgrade timer, which might've been exploitable in my game, but it's both against the spirit of the competition and also wound up wasting my sim's time before I figured out what was wrong with it. As soon as the unique upgrade was completed it was deleted from the shack Hendy Minn called home!)
Since I had no hope of catching up in terms of quantity, I tried for quality instead.
135 upgrades x 94% unique upgrades = 126 points
Now it's time for the nooboo factory challenge!