Hi,
If you need some of the new features you can always set the AsciidoctorJ version like in this example:
https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-maven-examples/blob/79bacdf5bd9874761d7bd9f9907cf844e202cfd7/asciidoc-to-html-example/pom.xml#L35-L39.
About the release, apologies, I want to get to it asap, but havent' been able to find time yet. There's one issue with asciidoctor-diagram and the integration of the new custom logger options that need to be included in this release.
If what you are looking for is integrating a custom logger to control de execution, you can use the SPI interface with the current release. Simply add your logger to the plugins dependencies and throw an exception. But that's nasty :/
PS: if there's some other specific feature you need and needs changes to the plugin, feel free to start a conversation on GitHub and try the code.
cheers,