Yeah okay. I think there is a very large group of developers who work in just such an environment: developing web applications that have a "production" version whether they are public internet or internal to companies where the previous version would literally _never_ be consumed. The reason to track a increment in that kind of environment is as a code to align feature requests to a particular release (usually by date), this is useful for all sorts of internal tracking questions like: was this feature I requested live by 4/1/2016.

I personally dislike using semvar for these instances (my own opinion only) because it feels overcomplicated as you stated. I also learned a long time ago that _any_ kind of date designator was a recipe for answering why the "April" release was actually live on June 1st ;). Recently, I've dropped back to Git SHA-1 which has alignment to a specific version of code released AND can be tracked by date and deploy tools.

So I agree with the thesis, disagree with the solution, but still think ryan_lane did not effectively refute it above.