I agree with both of the above points.

However, I think that unless a project ships (either via zip or Maven) these types of artifacts, they should be free to use/choose (via overwriting) whatever versions they want for these components. 

For example: JUnit Rules where added in JUnit 4.7 and ModeShape uses the Rules API in some unit tests. Since MS doesn't ship any test-artifacts, IMO we should still be free to use this version (or a greater one) regardless of what's in the POM (I know it's `4.11` in this particular case, which is fine, I just wanted give an example)