Wouldn’t it possible to just not remove the *-SNAPSHOT artifacts from the Maven repo then?
At least from an outsider (to the release process) point of view that would be better. Because for example if one depends on distro 2.3 and that somehow some dependencies on distro 2.3-SNAPSHOT are left down the line. Well, that is not the outsider’s business: if the Community “decides” that it is what distro 2.3 implies, then so be it. But since those older snapshots are removed from the Maven repo, it is sometimes just impossible to rebuild an older version of a project (even a fairly recent older version).