It seems counter-intuitive to have to use an archetype and then have to call another command to run a grails project. Maven already has a complicated and convoluted learning curve, and it seems like most maven users are very protective of this. I think that getting started with grails for maven users should be as plain vanilla maven as possible, otherwise you get into this weird "grailsfied maven" project that is unlike other maven projects.

Have you thought about putting the full grails stack under the <resources> tag of the archetype, this would mean the directory structure would be archetype/src/main/resources/grails-app and archetype/src/main/resources/web-app. This would allow me to run maven create without the extra structure problem.

can we also have a grails update-pom or something like this that will generate a POM for existing projects that already have plugins defined rather than simply allowing pom creation at startup time?

Will there be Gant scripts for each phase of the Maven lifecycle? ( http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-the-lifecycle.html#Lifecycle_Reference ) . Right now, the Octo plugin has goals that are not visible to the user, it simply wraps gant calls for the proper places in the life cycle. But this makes extending the cycle much more difficult, it would be nice to have editable targets that wrap the existing grails targets, so for package, for example, we would have a grails War target, but also add our won custom targets.