[jacques_chester]

I broadly agree with all of this, though I think it's possible to simplify the business of packaging and releasing with the right automation. But lowering the cost doesn't change the more important question of whether that cost is worth bearing.

> One of the main benefits of version numbers is that it tells your consumers where the breaking changes are, but if you have direct access to your consumers’ code and can commit changes, review them, and run their CI tests, then you have something much better than version numbers.

A small peeve of mine: Semver and version numbers generally are lossy compression. They try to squeeze a wide range of information into a very narrow space, for no other reason than tradition.