Upgrade from 5.5 to Latest (5.6.3) without doing a manual 5.6.0 upgrade

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Has anyone figured out how to upgrade from 5.5 to latest (5.6.3) without doing a manual upgrade at 5.6.0? I've gone through the steps to upgrade from 5.4 to latest going through the level upgrades in the dashboard. But keep getting the fatal error when trying to upgrade through the dashboard after 5.5. If I do the manual upgrade described in other posts (v 5.6.0) that works and I can then move on to other upgrades without getting the fatal error message. That's fine, but we have to update about 100 sites and pausing to do a manual upgrade at 5.6.0 adds about 30 minutes to each upgrade. So, in a nutshell... is there something that works better (i.e., faster) than a manual upgrade after 5.5? Any advice/recos would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.