How to use newer versions of HBase on Amazon Elastic MapReduce?

Amazon's Elastic MapReduce tool seems to only have support for HBase v0.92.x and v0.94.x.

The documentation for the EMR AMIs and HBase is seemingly out-of-date and there is no information about HBase on the newest release label emr-4.0.0.

Using this example from an AWS engineer, I was able to concoct a way to install another version of HBase on the nodes, but it was ultimately unsuccessful.

After much trial and error with the Java SDK to provision EMR with better versions, I ask:

Is it possible to configure EMR to use more recent versions of HBase (e.g. 0.98.x and newer?)