Looks like I also have a similar problem, but at least for me, I've noticed that for all the people who don't get updated pictures, Hermes also doesn't seem to pick up their birthdays... but seems to get their websites just fine.

It definately detects them, as matches, cause the dialog after a sync says # updated, and #+x matched, where x is the people who don't have pictures/birthdays... If I delete the websites field for those contacts, resyncing does update them, but it just fills the websites back in, nothing new.

Is there some sort of app privacy protection that these people activated or something?