One of the things we want / need to do is to test the Kafka RCs and their integration into the Strimzi Operators. But currently, the system tests always expect to use the same version of test clients as is the Kafka version. E.g., for testing release candidates of Kafka 3.1.0, they want to use the test clients with Kafka version 3.1.0 as well. But that is not possible since the 3.1.0 is not yet released and not yet supported in the test clients. Technically, the test clients with Kafka 3.1.0 should not be needed at this point, so testing with older Kafka version should be fine as well. So we should probably create a better separation of the version of Kafka used on the server side (brokers, connect, etc) and on the test client side. If they would be independent, they can be updated and used independently and the system tests can be easily executed against the release candidates without a new test-clients release for each RC.