So that we don't have to worry about forgetting to update it every time we release. Currently latest points at 3.3.0.Final, which is 3 "latest" releases behind (3.3.1, 4.0.0, 4.0.1). 

People can just see "nightly/trunk" as latest. There's also the symlink I created (see below) that links nightly/trunk to latest so people who've come to expect that latest/ will actually BE the latest (eg., see the confusion reported in https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBIDE-13711).