Plugin SDK and Confluence.war: Spring version mismatch

[Al Johnson]

An atlas-created Confluence plugin for version 5.10.8 of Confluence has dependencies for Spring that are very much earlier than the actual install-provided versions.  For example, only version 2.0.8 of spring-context.jar is pulled-in as a maven build dependency, but the version used in the confluence.war as well as our running production instance uses version 4.2.5... that's two major versions difference! 

Is there a reason of such a difference?  Can I safely specifiy the current 4.2.5 versions in my plugin project's POM?