As far as I know, with the exception of SWT, most Maven artifacts of Eclipse rely heavily on an OSGi environment and thus cannot decouple with Eclipse and cannot be used in a standalone manner. If striving so, you'll end up with implementing a desperate list of interface methods that eventually may deviate from your mission focus and may not work at all. I'm not sure why Tycho needs to straddle and pull artifacts from both Maven and P2 repositories. Sometimes I just want to go without Eclipse IDE. I'd like to use part of Eclipse classes as data models and even part of the methods to get needed data, instead of writing my own code to parse such files as p2.index, content.jar, and artifacts.jar. Artifacts of SWT on Maven are able to go without Eclipse.
Most online tutorials teach you how to write plugins and RCPs inside Eclipse IDE but how about developing a standalone application parsing P2 repositories, identifying dependencies and fetching needed artifacts and features in my own way in place of the P2 way, with the help of dependencies from Maven and built-in Java libraries? Are there any systematic tutorials or documentations instructing so?