Hello I tried to look at maven-eclipse-plugin tests and was really confused on it's testing framework complexity.
What about moving thoses IT tests to src/it via the Shitty maven plugin ( http://mojo.codehaus.org/shitty-maven-plugin/usage.html) I allready used it and found it simple to use and very powerfull. The only difficulty AFAIK is to refactor the generated file verification to be used from validate.groovy scripts. I also got some errors running the tests as my local repo contains some source jars, so the generated .classpath files does not match the expected ones. Maybe those tests should rely on a test localrepository and a test remoterepository to avoid such false-failures Nico.
