Long story short, answer to my actual question "So is there a way to avoid this?" is: No, not with the current way the library is being utilized.

Thanks for the good input.

I'll obviously be giving this some thought to figure out what would fit better in our environment. Like I said, dynamically linking caused some headaches when someone made changes to the library, pushed it to stable, and a customer checked for update and got the new library, but the application built/tested against the new library hadn't been pushed to stable yet. If the interface changes to any degree, this will cause application failure when the old app tries to use the new library. This was what initially was being avoided with static linking, not the best choice by any means, simply the easiest/quickest at the time. Best choice is obviously dynamic linking, with better version control by the engineering team.