Carsten Hammer we'd be happy to experiment some ways to make this easier to end users, as we're aware this is a common issue.

Fully aligning platforms is really not feasible though, I'll spare you the many reasons.. the main point is that you'd have to wait for a long time for different "parts" to catch up.

For example, to make the example of Hibernate Search not having a release compatible with Hibernate ORM: true, because the team couldn't work on that yet. So the solution would have been to AVOID release Hibernate ORM 5.2 until that was done, i.e. in a month or two? That would slow everyone down, including all users.
Also note that e.g. Validator, but also Hibernate Search, can be used without Hibernate ORM so some people might want to use the latest features from these w/o waiting for a matching ORM release.

I'm open to consider suggestions, but I'm afraid there's not much we can do other than write down the compatible ranges in the README (like we do).