I totally agree. Weld archetypes are probably the best polished ones I have ever seen. They remind me of some of the Rails semantics (get up and running in minutes).
These similarities got me thinking about another aspect of Rails - Plugins or gems (which I think is a mixed bag). The promise of plugins/gems is that you can quickly add dependent code and do some setup in minutes as well. I think that maven could very well be a platform to do the same. Currently one has to add dependencies by hand and quite often tweak the exclusions. With the introduction of maven console plugin, I think the door became open to create maven plugins/console scripts to make this a more automated process.
I don't have the expertise to create a prototype. I also don't know if this is really something that could be useful in the community (or simply serve as a tool for Maven newbies).
In any case, I wanted to see what the community thinks about this.