As of now, MavenArtifactUtil only evaluates profiles and repositories from settings.xml, but not:

• autentication credentials from servers element
• proxy settings from proxies element
• mirror settings from mirrors element

MavenSettings does not even parse these elements yet.

This is not a problem as long as an artifact can be resolved from the local repository but once the artifact has to be downloaded, you are out of luck e.g. when sitting behing a proxy (in a corporate environment).

There is also no support for an alternate location of settings.xml (see mvn -s ... for example).

I ran into this problem tyring to build WildFly Swarm, see this comment on SWARM-1130.