Benedict, I had said above in the thread to let it run through til January, can we please respect that. I do not think the week before xmas is a great time to push it into a vote, when this is not urgent.
I pointed to the code where we sort versions in a case-insensitive way. That means PRE1 breaks. Such breakages occurred in the lead up to 4.0.0, and we would have to custom patch the semver4j library to make PRE1 be before the alphas. The test run you provided did not include upgrade tests, and for those to break you would need a wrongly ordered incompatibility, e.g. from an alpha to a PRE. It has also been mentioned that drivers (and other test systems) break. Currently our snapshots do come with a pre-release label, but they do come with a build metadata label (being either the explicit "SNAPSHOT" or the timestamp). This is visible in the nightlies link I provided. So we do have a precedence in place to distinguish between released versions and snapshot builds, I say let's continue that.
