I have a remote view, created soley to reduce query time, that has 50 updateable fields scattered over five tables. I am hoping that one of you can tell me there is a better way to update the base tables than writing UPDATE yadada SET base_field_n = viewField_n where etc. for each of the base tables.

Were these local tables, the prefered option would be a regular set of relationships in the data environment.

As remote views the best option would be nested selects.
By nested selects I mean, from a QBF query on the parent, then on load data for child1, where key in qb_results, for bridge_table_key in QBF results, for bridge_table_child in bridge_table results, etc. This way, if selecting six records to work on, there would only be 6 bridge_table records loaded, not 1200+