Major Description
Things like jetty and junit can easily be upgraded between x.y.z releases since they don't affect the API, but merely affect our build. Upgrading to the latest doesn't necessarily have benefits, other than not having to do it yourself for each quickstart that is generated.
The maven plugins should use the newest versions, since a lot of crap can come from not using them. Running the build with maven 3 (due to be released soon) will uncover some issues, for example with multi-threaded builds.