Spring and Spring Boot versions are not aligned

The 14.6.2 and 14.6.3 releases (and possibly other 14.6.x versions) have a mismatch of dependencies sourced via the spring.version POM variable (explicitly set to 5.3.7) and the spring-boot.version (explicitly set to 2.4.9, which transitively includes many core spring artifacts at 5.3.9).

Our spring.version and spring-boot.version must be aligned, or dependency chaos will result.