+1 for using dicts (or something alike) here in 2.0, because named parameters are a bit better to understand, but I'm not sure if we should do away with the tuples, because they are convenient for the most common case (name, version).
 But maybe we should then deprecate tuples with more then 2 entries? (discussion needed, see https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/691)

So adding dicts without deprecating tuples seems fine for now.