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

+1 The whole meaning of this exercise (additional pom config, additional module creation, etc) was to make the out of the box experience as good as possible. The situation where you had to run external builds and keep certain resources in sync manually we already had. This was about resolving them.