The idea is to make the Quickstarts independent of the whole distribution. It makes thm more visible and helps developers to make their idea on the product without downloading full product or cloning a huge repo.
In the JDF ideal path, all examples (quickstarts) should be extracted to a new repo in jboss-fuse organization and dependencies versions should be maintain via a BOM pom. Now the discussion is open, you are the best to see the pros and cons of such an approach.