Is there some way to stop Maven from resolving artefacts in the Eclipse workbench?
I know I can set it manually, but I would be nice if it can be set through the POM.
No I don't think so. In my opinion Maven even should not bother about IDE settings. This would only mess up the POM (like already done with the eclipse lifecycle-mapping configuration for plugins in eclipse).
I would support if this would be a global setting of the m2e plugin of eclipse.