Why is the numbering of the package so undescriptive?

If you look at the fglrx package for raring: http://packages.ubuntu.com/raring/fglrx you can see it's numbered 9.010. But this, unfortunately, doesn't tell much which version it is, as AMD (usually) releases drivers with YEAR.MONTH naming scheme. The only easy way to find out when the driver was released is to use:http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Category%3aReleases

My question is: why this numbering is used? I think it's very confusing.