Well both are necessary--it's important to indicate whether it is the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. released based off the specified bitcoin release. It is also important to indicate the sequential ordering of freicoin releases, which the old numbering scheme lacked. You can look to the last number, which will always be increasing, as the freicoin build number.
Yes, these recent releases are very much a part of the effort to switch to newer bitcoin versions. The reason for these truncation soft-forks are to minimize the size of the freicoin patch against bitcoin and the required dependencies, in or