Looks like Maven RC2 will land over the next few days. Currently the only things left to do are check the plugins for necessary releases, then build it and test it.

The big fixes this time round are
- a huge reduction in the memory used when using the reactor to load lots of projects
- improved startup time
- bugfixes
- and more, and this doesn't even include the plugin improvements :)

In the process, the core was overhauled and should make Maven 1.0 maintainable while we move over to MavenNG, which I'm quite excited about.