Not sure what else to say, I've stated the purpose of these plug-ins above.

It depends on your definition of "essential". For me, that's being able to compile the code and run the tests from within the IDE. For that, the JAXB plug-in and the dependency plug-in are needed (as said, the latter would require some investigation of the usage to be 100% sure what is affected). The Tycho plug-in is not required for that.

If you only think compilation is essential but not running WF-based integration tests, the JAXB plug-in would be enough.

You also can skip the plug-ins altogether if you run an external Maven build manually prior to importing. But I'd consider that a worse out-of-the-box experience than mapping the plug-ins in the described way.