1989 Donruss Traded Baseball Forum

I know they had a bunch of separate smaller sets, like "The Rookies" and "Opening Day" etc, but did they ever issue an actual Update or Traded year end set?

They did in 1992. It is listed on this site as an insert/related set. 

https://www.tcdb.com/Checklist.cfm/sid/182

1989 traded

jkeever was faster, but I think this was Donruss' first "catch-up" set.

https://www.tcdb.com/ViewSet.cfm/sid/10102/1989-Donruss-Traded

I was wondering when I was updating my 1989 Donruss and 1989 Donruss Traded collections whether the two sets should be added to each other's "Related Sets" section or whether that's strictly for sets that could have come from the same packs.

Strictly from the same packs. Only Parallel sets that were issued exclusively in factory set format are placed in related sets (such as Glossy/Tiffany/Member's Only sets; for items that were not available in the same packs). Traded/Update sets are listed separately (unless of course they were issued only in the same packs, like the 1974 and 1976 Topps Traded cards).

The 1989 Traded set didn't have rookies in it like the Fleer and Topps ones (those were in the separate Rookies box set instead), so there wasn't much interest in a set of veterans in updated uniforms, even though it had Ryan on the Rangers and Murray on the Dodgers.

I'm curious why they bothered when most of the players appeared with their new teams in the larger Baseball's Best set.  1989 Traded was redundant.

That's because they were issued in the red factory sets. 4 cards per FS.