Thanks for your response. I was using this page as a starting point to understand the available options:
It recommends implementing a project configurator and build participant and deploying them as an eclipse plug-in as described here:
Is this option mainly intended to wrap existing maven-plugins and to provide more extensive eclipse project configuration capabilities? (Btw. It would be nice if the document had a section on how to provision these m2e connectors, i.e. create repository, deploy to it, and make it available to eclipse developers; at a minimum some pointers to the right tycho docs would be useful.)
Are you suggesting that if I write my own plugin, I should instead include the lifecycle mapping in my maven plugin and use the build context API to add incremental behavior, as described here?
