Curious way of seeing it. I've never considered a new major version as being an entirely new OS... Do normal users even consider new Windows versions as anything but a UI "upgrade"?
If you don't want version numbers maybe you should run a rolling release distro? I don't think you'll be able to convince everyone to stop using them. They're quite instrumental when dealing with old systems on LTS versions when having to deal with EOL.
Or maybe this post is more of a "I just realized"-post?
In many engineering professions you really need to understand the underlying math to have a chance in hell to interpret the results correctly. Just because you get a result doesn't mean you get an answer.