This is a very serious issue for the Spark project because a lot of Spark users build from source. We are going to upgrade mqtt version for future releases, but this breaks all current/past releases. In case you are not familiar with Spark, it is now the most actively developed Big Data open source project: in the past year alone, there are close to 400 people that have contributed code to the project. Many applications are being built on top of this and this can potentially break all of them. I'd also imagine this breaks other non-Spark projects that depend on mqtt as well.
A released artifact in a repository should be immutable. Spark depends on it, other applications depend on it, and applications that depend on Spark can depend on it. The transitive closure is pretty large.
Again, we are going to upgrade the mqtt dependency in Spark, but I urge you to add the 0.4.0 artifact back. Otherwise we would have to be extra cautious in the future with respect to any dependency on mqtt, e.g. removing it from the dependency or the default build profile, which would cause inconvenience for our users also.