[m2e-users] questions about "Update Maven Dependencies"

[Eugen Paraschiv <hanriseldon@xxxxxxxxx>]

I have a few questions about the "Update Maven Dependencies" feature in M2Eclipse. 
First, when I have Maven as offline, I expected that this action would no longer reach out to the repositories and download anything. This doesn't seem to be the case, even with Maven configured as offline, this still downloads my dependencies. Is this expected behavior, or is it an issue? 
The second question is still about the "Update Maven dependencies" feature. I have build my project (simply clean install) and so I have resolved all dependencies. The repository has a number of jars at this point. Then, I do "Update Maven dependencies" and a LOT of other jars start to get downloaded into my repo. Why is that? Shouldn't an "Update Maven Dependencies" only download what I need, and seeing how I just build the project, download nothing at all? 
It seems like the Maven mechanism that chooses the version in case of a conflict doesn't work here and the plugin simply downloads a whole bunch of other versions that should have been ignored by the dependency resolution process based on the fact that I have overridden these versions myself. 
This is not a minor download either - for a non-trivial project, my repository nearly doubles in size. 
I'm aware that this is the way m2eclipse works and has always worked, but I'm wondering if this is expected, or if I'm missing something. 
Thanks you for any feedback. 
Eugen.