The difficulty with changing the groupId is that if we do that, we should really also change the package names, because two different groupIds means you can very easily get two different artifacts on the classpath with the same class files in them, and then it's russian roulette as to whether it works or not..  By discriminating using the version number, then we can be sure that there is only one version of the classes on the classpath, and it's easy to determine exactly which version, and easy to fix (simply add an explicit dependency to that version in your build, rather than potentially adding many excludes to all the artifacts that try to bring in the wrong groupId artifact).