I'm sure we all experience the "dilema of choice" from all these tools and standards like Maven, Ivy, Eclipse, etc. It took me a couple years of constant pressure to finally bite the bullet and start using Maven. (And their documentation really does suck!)
But, like so many JBoss initiatives, IronJacamar is a really wonderful contributiont to the Java EE space—hell, are there any more difficult and opaque technologies than JCA out there!!?! As I said before, your code generation template and your embeddable testing platform are like manna from heaven for the poor engineer wandering into this space!
I just don't want these Maven issues to be blockers that ward-away an engineer from IronJacamar during the initial discovery/evaluation phase. I'm pretty underwater at the moment, but if I can put a few hours into this (sometime over the next 2-3 weeks), maybe there are a couple simple tweaks we can figure out that smooth these things out.