On Sun, January 16, 2011 4:43:18 PM Brett wrote I'll take that up with the maven list, but that's surprising given the first two paragraphs here: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/maven-dev/201008.mbox/
As far as I know there are no guarantees about whether the Aether API will remain stable across versions. Use it in your plugins at your own risk. Thanks for the link. I'd say none of the "maven-compat" APIs should have been marked deprecated if the 2.1 API is preferential over the lower level libraries like aether. ArtifactFactory and WagonManager throw you compile warnings and the lower level APIs do not.
