I love these questions, questions where the person who asks them also gives the answer. It’s not the answer he likes but nevertheless it is the answer.
One thing is missing though: you should mark this question as solved.
Seriously, I don’t know of any other way to show the updates so I always use the one you described.
Most likely by switching to applying updates immediately, instead of rebooting.
With this option, you will see all the individual packages.
There does not appear to be a way to do this otherwise, as far as I can see.