Hi,
It's a little chicken and egg indeed, if people would massively and all the time re-stage to the same version number eventually problems might happen because of that. But it's in principle only very close to the release that a final version is staged, and then it's quite rare that a re-stage is needed and ever rarer that such re-stage will cause a breaking problem.
If everything would be centrally managed, you'd indeed very carefully release in dependency order, especially for those projects that physically include other dependencies (such as GF and the main open MQ distro). The risk is that say GF includes Foo-1.0.0.jar in its binary distro, and then the Foo-1.0.0.jar that gets released to Maven Central eventually differs. So then you got two different Foo-1.0.0.jars out there.
For projects that only link to their dependencies and/or have provided dependencies this risk is much lower of course.
We can now indeed trigger 6.0.0 and do a PR to GF to update to that.
Kind regards,
Arjan Tijms