So basically this is a complaint about having to manually upgrade packages in the manifest because his small company makes lots of regular, breaking changes? I

So basically this is a complaint about having to manually upgrade packages in the manifest because his small company makes lots of regular, breaking changes? If that is the case do you have to follow rules for semver? (edit- that is indeed what they do) Your users are all internal, its not like they are going to rat you out to the police for agreeing to do something different internally. It's just a couple of numbers... I don't do go but, as described, the version system seems fair and reasonable on paper, for a system designed to avoid suddenly breaking code that depends on it.