Preserve property references when using release:prepare goal with autoResolveSnapshots parameter

[rcmul]

New feature, improvement proposal

I have property references to snapshot dependencies in my project

...
<properties>
  <dep.version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</dep.version>
</properties> 
...
<dependency>
  <groupId>dep</groupId>
  <artifactId>dep1</artifactId>
  <version>${dep.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>dep</groupId>
  <artifactId>dep2</artifactId>
  <version>${dep.version}</version>
</dependency>
...

When I run the release:prepare goal with the autoResolveSnapshots parameter set, the plugin correctly infers that the property referenced in the dependency section is a snapshot that needs to be resolved, but it removes the references and makes inline updates for each dependency while leaving the now-unreferenced property unchanged.

...
<properties>
  <dep.version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</dep.version>
</properties>
...
<dependency>
  <groupId>dep</groupId>
  <artifactId>dep1</artifactId>
  <version>1.0.0</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>dep</groupId>
  <artifactId>dep2</artifactId>
  <version>1.0.0</version>
</dependency>
...

Can the autoResolveSnapshots functionality be changed so that property references are preserved during resolution?