@dansup That is what I meant earlier when i said Semantic versioning treates v0.x.x as special.

If you had lets say 38 MAJOR level updates in the past year and 3 MINOR level updates, since you are pre-production that would make the version v0.41.0

v1 on semantic versioning is ALWAYS the first stable release, that is defined in the spec. So by going semantic versioning now it would not cause the MAJOR version to bump as you described.

Here are points 4 and 5 from the standard that reiterate what I just said:

4. Major version zero (0.y.z) is for initial development. Anything MAY change at any time. The public API SHOULD NOT be considered stable.

5. Version 1.0.0 defines the public API. The way in which the version number is incremented after this release is dependent on this public API and how it changes.