@byxorna yep, you summarized what I was trying to say better than I was saying it :)
Do you really think its a good idea to remove the --version option?  That seems pretty standard to me, either to have that option and/or display the version information in the usage message.  Either way, we need a way to access that information in some way.
I know this is sort of the opposite of what you suggested @dallasmarlow, but what if instead of having the version number hard coded in several places, we have all of these files load the version number dynamically from the VERSION file?