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Forensics and other applications that care about atime updates can and
should check atime and don't need i_version to know that it was changed.
The reliability of atime as an audit tool has dropped considerably since
the default in relatime.

I've been waiting for Amir to appear in this discussion -- ISTR that a
few years ago you were wanting the ability to scan a filesystem to look
for files that have changed since a given point.  If XFS exported its
di_changecount file attribute (as it currently behaves) via BULKSTAT,
you'd have the ability to do that, so long as your application could
persist bulkstat data and compare.

It's true that exporting i_version via BULKSTAT could be useful
to some backup/sync applications.

For my case, I was interested in something a bit different -
finding all the changes in a very large fs tree - or IOW finding if
anything has changed inside a large tree since a point in time.
So not sure if i_version would help for that use case.

Thanks,
Amir.