There's plenty that API providers can do to make things saner for all of us, and themselves. Problem is, many (if not most) of them don't seem to care enough. As users of APIs we are their customers, and we outnumber them. Let's find a way to show them the benefits of making our lives easier.
I haven't been following those discussions very closely, so I'd love to hear more. It's not clear to me where that hypermedia approach might take us, as a community. My first impression is that this feels like an approach that requires more upfront buy-in from the API providers, and puts a fair bit of burden on all the clients.
We do intend to version the swagger docs, so that a specific description will point to a matching version of the service. A new version of the doc will have to be created whenever the service is updated. Our goal is to get a large developer community involved, at which point the API owners will find it worthwhile to do this themselves.
With Geekier our primary goal is to make things better for folks, like us, who are building apps using the APIs available today. We've come up with a pragmatic solution that lets us decouple our applications from the APIs we're using. It's pretty simple and doesn't try to solve every conceivable case, which is hopefully how we'll avoid the pitfalls of some past attempts at this.