As I could not find information about this anywhere, it would be nice if the docs could list the following issue. Due to a bug/feature in SemVer check, version rc9 is regarded as a higher version then eg rc11. See https://jubianchi.github.io/semver-check/, put ^1.0.0-rc9 on the left and 1.0.0-rc11 on the right.
This means that if you run eg yarn upgrade it will by default install rc9. The funny thing is, if you run yarn upgrade nuxt@latest it does install rc11.
Both npm outdated as yarn outdated reflect this issue:
$ npm outdated
Package Current Wanted Latest Location
nuxt 1.0.0-rc11 1.0.0-rc9 1.0.0-rc11
$ yarn outdated
yarn outdated v1.1.0
Package Current Wanted Latest Package Type URL
nuxt 1.0.0-rc11 1.0.0-rc9 1.0.0-rc11 dependencies https://github.com/nuxt/nuxt.js#readme
Done in 0.99s.Relevant yarn issue: https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/3560
I guess this was the same reason why in the past you switched from alpha2 to alpha.2?