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I want to see some support for alpha, beta, pre-release, and snapshot versions.

The problem is that everyone does it differently, and build systems have a hard time distinguishing these non-production-ready versions. For example, I type "mvn versions:display-dependency-updates" and I get a suggestion that I use "junit 4.13-beta-2".

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The SemVer spec does have pre-release versions https://semver.org/#spec-item-9

But, I guess you're saying that certain kinds of names in the pre-release space should have defined semantics?

“-SNAPSHOT” suffix already has defined semantics in Maven world, which would make sense to replicate elsewhere, since it’s very convenient for CI. Alfa, Beta etc. could be used to improve multi-environment CD (eg UAT envs could accept RCs, production - only stable versions and so on).

Ah yes, didn't know that was there. Would be nice if Maven acknowledged it.

Some kind of standardization would be helpful. In particular, it would be good if a tool could sort on the post-hyphen part so it could know which pre-release version is most recent.