Deeply unimpressed by the complete lack of response to a report of a fairly serious bug in the Maven Assembly plugin. Polite requests for assistance on the developer mailing list went ignored. Hopefully this is just down to everyone being busy with the 3.5.0 release and not indicative of the Assembly plugin basically being abandonware.
Right now, if you want to create a distribution archive when using version ranges to refer to artifacts within the current reactor, you're basically out of luck.
2017-02-28: The title of this post has been modified in order to protect the pedantic.
2017-06-17: This turned out to be my fault. See: Assembly Redux