I thought I would follow up on the issue on the reddit.com/r/corsair subreddit. Their technical support was stickied at the top, so I thought I would ask there. CorsairJordan was helpful in giving this response:
I personally find this to be a lie by omission. Either the RGB zones were intended to be programmable independent elements like all of their products or their focus was to create a mouse with excellent battery life. However, the product was released with the expectation that all zones would be programmable and it had the battery life intended. All of their marketing shows:
That means that their product is now limited in lighting adjustability, which certainly seems like false advertising. Every review I have seen with this product identified it as having independently adjustable RGB zones, and for them to update these features away does not seem like a satisfactory decision for the user. A proper solution would have been to allow users to disable dynamic RGB lighting effects in favor of static lighting or no lighting when using power saving modes on the software.
=End of rant
TL;DR: Corsair broke the functionality on the update, won't admit fault, and is supposedly working on a solution.