I haven't had a chance to test it out (will do so at the hackathon), but according to http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-1797 it seems that you can now safely exclude a dependency without wrecking the rest of your build - how cool is that :-P
Jorgps Snapshots can be downloaded from http://maven.zones.apache.org/ ~maven/builds/branches/maven-2.0.x/
