Would is also be OK if we defined these versions as <version.camel-blueprint>${camel.version}</version.camel-blueprint> and then replace things at build time so we get our examples in the distribution as shown here (with the version fully specified in the POM itself)?

The benefit would be that we can still reuse the globally defined Camel version from the root pom.xml without the need for a <parent/> element, so we don't have to do anything extra to get these versions aligned properly again when we do a new release.