XOM and Jaxen Transitive Dependencies with Maven

I briefly looked at using XOM to do some XML parsing in a Maven 2-built Java project this afternoon, only to discover that XOM has a transitive dependency on Jaxen and Jaxen has a transitive dependency on all of DOM4J, JDOM, Xercse and XOM again.

This is frustrating.  Seems to come from the fact that the Jaxen team didn't build Jaxen's POM (JAXEN-138, JAXEN-151, MEV-413), and nobody else wants to take responsibility for it.  

The longer-term fix is the thought (July, 2006) that Jaxen might move to Maven 2.  I'm quite tempted to volunteer for that port simply to solve this problem for me in the future.