"One bad programmer can break more than 10 good ones can fix": the issue you raise is bad engineering (increasing the version number simply because you can) and is not a problem semantic versioning is trying to solve. What it *does* try to solve is that the engineers working on the software can see the problems coming. Applications (and libraries) like Subversion have managed to stay within the boundaries of semantic versioning for almost 20 years now, still "stuck" at version 1.x because of it. At the same time they have succeeded to add significant new features to the software without breaking backward compatibility. So: it's possible. The fact that projects like e.g. Cucumber release a new major version every few months says more about those projects than about semver.