No, not by default, the best on the user side is still to try to get the latest possible version of everything.
See here for the changes, which were performance-oriented but shouldn’t change the end results.
You can, however, try to install lowest bounds by maximising, instead of minimising, the count[version-lag,changed] criterion. Note that mccs doesn’t perform well with maximisations, though. aspcud is still an option for such cases. Since the criteria format is annoyingly different, see opam config report --solver aspcud for the defaults. The criteria you want would be something along the lines of -count(removed),-sum(request,version-lag),-count(down),-count(changed),+sum(changed,version-lag). for installing mirage-clock on an empty 4.04.2 switch, for example, this gives me:
∗ install ocamlbuild 0.9.1 [required by fmt]
∗ install conf-m4 1 [required by ocamlfind]
∗ install ocamlfind 1.6.2 [required by jbuilder]
∗ install jbuilder 1.0+beta9 [required by mirage-clock]
∗ install fmt 0.7.0 [required by mirage-device]
∗ install mirage-device 1.1.0 [required by mirage-clock]
∗ install mirage-clock 1.3.0
instead of
∗ install ocamlbuild 0.11.0 [required by fmt]
∗ install conf-m4 1 [required by ocamlfind]
∗ install result 1.2 [required by fmt]
∗ install uchar 0.0.2 [required by fmt]
∗ install ocamlfind 1.7.3 [required by jbuilder]
∗ install topkg 0.9.1 [required by fmt]
∗ install jbuilder 1.0+beta14 [required by mirage-clock]
∗ install fmt 0.8.4 [required by mirage-device]
∗ install mirage-device 1.1.0 [required by mirage-clock]
∗ install mirage-clock 1.3.0