Hi @Edlueze,
The forum post you linked is not quite correct, you can actually build KNIME extensions with maven and Tycho, in fact you are doing exactly that in the Scientific Strategy nodes.
To include maven dependencies, there are two better strategies, I know of, than the one you correctly identified as brittle:
1.) Add the maven dependencies to your target platform file directly, in many cases eclipse is able to generate the p2 plugins from that directly, take a look here for an example birt/org.eclipse.birt.target.target at master · eclipse/birt · GitHub. You will need to adapt your tycho build to use that target platform, as you can see in the same repository: birt/pom.xml at 7d6429dca1dfb9313e8667d939819d826d7e98bd · eclipse/birt · GitHub
2.) Converting the external dependencies to p2 plugins and creating a dedicated update site for them. Take a look into GitHub - reficio/p2-maven-plugin: Maven3 plugin that automates the third-party dependency management for Eclipse RCP. This is what we use to bundle external dependencies for use in AP development. This allows you to generate an update site that contains your maven dependencies.
In both cases, you will also need to add the created plugins to your update site, either via a feature or directly, so that users have access to them when they are installing your plugin.
best,
Gabriel