I grey what you are saying and agree for the most part. Except for the "in the gradle world" part. I think that to a degree once you apply the maven plugin you are saying something about how you want certain things to work.
The use case I am most thinking of is that of mixed build tool environments. Yes forcing publishing to just the remote repo and then the maven build to grab it from there works. But again it's a question of what is a reasonable expectation from someone who has a gradle build with the maven plugin applied.
