I understand the point that "maven2-plugin" makes sense in terms of the groupId and in terms of the project structure, but it really doesn't make senese for people who use maven. You can specify some plugins without groupIds. This may be only for org.apache.maven.plugins....I cannot recall at this time. If you can do it for any groupId mapped in your settings.xml such as

<pluginGroups> <pluginGroup>com.google.testability-explorer</pluginGroup> </pluginGroups>

then you might have a problem with this approach because then they would only need to put the following the pom:

<plugin> <artifactId>maven2-plugin</artifactId> </plugin>

and that can be really confusing. While I think this is always a bad way to define plugins without groupIds, I see it all the time.