[kibwen]

This right here. The only reason people observe tension between semantic versioning and romantic versioning is because prior to semantic versioning we spent decades conflating the version number to convey both "important new feature" and "incompatible changes". Both user marketing and technical compatibility guidance are important, but there's nothing that inherently says that both of these things need to be communicated via a single version number. Pick a nice-sounding word to market your version with big changes, and leave it unrelated to your API version.