thanks for the reply, personally I want to block uploads of -SNAPSHOT versions if there is a release version rather than rely on people to move on. I have a highly distributed team and not everyone pays attention to their emails as good as they should and don't tend to read wiki pages for comprehension either. thus returning an error that the -SNAPSHOT version you are trying to publish is at a release and no longer allowed to be updated would notify them of their mistake.
It isn't a social problem as much as a human nature problem and can be tacked with a few lines of code more consistently than any other alternative.
