[dragonwriter]

First, why? Semver is for humans -- it puts a defined meaning to version numbers so that humans can gain useful information from them (this also is useful for automation, because once there is a clear unambiguous meaning, workflows, automated or not, can use that meaning as input.)

The "romantic" version is pure noise that adds no information, for humans or machines.

Second, why octets specifically instead of numbers (or, more precisely, non-negative integers) more generally? Is there any value in restricting the range of components of a version number to 0-255?