It is something we have been discussing several times in the past but this release scheme does lock us in very inconvenient ways:

• it might force satellite projects to bump versions even if they lack the time and resource to do so at a given time: most of our release process is automated but it still does take time and would require some tag and branching mojo
• it prevents a satellite project to announce or work on a significant change out of sync with the main project (ORM) agenda and life cycle - at least it its versioning scheme. Note that Hibernate Search and Hibernate Validator have a life of their own even without ORM