Hi Lukas, I saw your message on the IRC. I think that properties under the project node were never used in m1. It was certainly added to prepare the compatibility with m2. None of our plugins use them. I don't know when it was added (certainly that it can be seen in subversion).
I think it was added by Brett, when he updated the maven model. I'm not sure that it is interesting for us to keep them. arnaud
