Jason, It seems to me, and I'm likely to be confused, that what we have here is a collision of maven and plexus.
The maven-compiler-plugin is a thin wrapper on the plexus compiler system. The plexus compiler system uses the plexus component model to add new compilers. So, adding a new compiler involves adding a *plexus* component, not a maven component. On top of this, the author of the maven plugin created an abstract class to allow the creation of multiple mojos, but did not put it in a separate component, and thus more or less restricted it to being used only inside of the one plugin. Having written all this, if the @component in the javadoc of AbstractCompilerMojo were, indeed, a live 1.5 snail instead of javadoc, all of this would have just worked. --benson
