Ivy is also a part of Groovy, through Grapes. There are quite a few forks of Ivy on GitHub, perhaps it is worth the while to solicit PRs?
Meanwhile, I was asking for help/opinions about https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/IVY-1478 (updatesite resolver) which would in turn help setting up builds for IvyDE (because Eclipse folks no longer provide drops and OSGi resolver provided by Eclipse launcher is cumbersome).
