The rationale for this change is to help system administrators keep their sanity when administrating multiple CMOD servers that may be on different versions.
I find it especially useful during upgrades, since old versions of the IBM CMOD Client couldn't co-exist in the past, meaning I either had to keep re-installing back-and-forth between 8.x and 9.x versions of the administrator, which quickly becomes infuriating.
-JD.