Upgraded APIs: Flink (0.8) and HBase (0.98.x) + profiles

I had to create an hadoop.core.version variable to manage the fact that cloudera has different versions for hadoop-core and hadoop-common..
Why do we need this additional profile?
Can't users select the hadoop2 profile and then set the specific hadoop and hbase versions through properties, like `-Dhbase.version=0.98.1-cdh5` ?