Thanks cynerd.
Looking through this forum for advises to problems similar to my own, I came across this which suggested that the updater may have hard-coded connection/download time limit.
So I looked through packages that needed updating (since I was on 3.10.8), picked the ones that looked relatively uncustomised, and updated them directly.
I updated less than a handful of packages individually, and the above updater issue resolved itself 
.
So now - I am hoping to get nextcloud running again, and I am stuck with this error messages:
root@node00:~# pkgupdate
WARN:Script file:///usr/share/updater/localrepo/localrepo.lua not found, but ignoring its absence as requested
WARN:Requested package luci-i18n-ddns-en that is missing, ignoring as requested.
And when I tried accessing nextcloud through http://node00/nextcloud, all I get is a blank page (View page source reveled blank as well).
What else can I do/try?
Thanks in advance.