Transitive Dependency Resolution silently fails if parent pom cannot be retrieved from repository

While preparing our projects to be migrated from Maven 2 (currently using 2.2.1) to Maven 3 (3.0-alpha-5) I faced a problem concerning transitive dependencies. I had the following setup:

3 projects:

• a parent project (PARENT)
• Project A (parent = PARENT with lots of 3rd party libs as dependencies)
• Project B (parent = PARENT and declares Project A to be a dependency)

I tried to build Project B using Maven 3 but the build failed, because Project A's transitive dependencies were not resolved. When trying to build the same project using Maven 2 it successfully picked up the transitive dependencies. After a bit of searching I activated the error stacktraces and saw the following exception when running the project's build with Maven 3:

[DEBUG] Unable to find resource 'PARENT:pom:0.4-SNAPSHOT' in repository internal-snapshots (https://foo.bar/maven/internal-snapshots)
org.apache.maven.wagon.ResourceDoesNotExistException: Failure to resolve PARENT/0.1-SNAPSHOT/PARENT-0.4-SNAPSHOT.pom from https://foo.bar/maven/internal-snapshots was cached in the local repository. Resolution will not be reattempted until the update interval of internal-snapshots has elapsed or updates are forced.
at org.apache.maven.repository.legacy.DefaultWagonManager.getArtifact(DefaultWagonManager.java:114)
at org.apache.maven.repository.legacy.DefaultWagonManager.getArtifact(DefaultWagonManager.java:131)
at org.apache.maven.artifact.resolver.DefaultArtifactResolver.resolve(DefaultArtifactResolver.java:215)
at org.apache.maven.artifact.resolver.DefaultArtifactResolver.resolve(DefaultArtifactResolver.java:461)
at org.apache.maven.repository.legacy.LegacyRepositorySystem.resolve(LegacyRepositorySystem.java:325)
at org.apache.maven.project.RepositoryModelResolver.resolveModel(RepositoryModelResolver.java:171)
at org.apache.maven.model.building.DefaultModelBuilder.readParentExternally(DefaultModelBuilder.java:567)
at org.apache.maven.model.building.DefaultModelBuilder.readParent(DefaultModelBuilder.java:434)
at org.apache.maven.model.building.DefaultModelBuilder.build(DefaultModelBuilder.java:179)
at org.apache.maven.model.building.DefaultModelBuilder.build(DefaultModelBuilder.java:117)
at org.apache.maven.project.DefaultProjectBuilder.build(DefaultProjectBuilder.java:112)
at org.apache.maven.project.DefaultProjectBuilder.build(DefaultProjectBuilder.java:232)
at org.apache.maven.project.DefaultProjectBuilder.build(DefaultProjectBuilder.java:191)
at org.apache.maven.project.artifact.MavenMetadataSource.retrieveRelocatedProject(MavenMetadataSource.java:571)
at org.apache.maven.project.artifact.MavenMetadataSource.retrieve(MavenMetadataSource.java:184)
at org.apache.maven.repository.legacy.resolver.DefaultLegacyArtifactCollector.recurse(DefaultLegacyArtifactCollector.java:533)
at org.apache.maven.repository.legacy.resolver.DefaultLegacyArtifactCollector.collect(DefaultLegacyArtifactCollector.java:150)
at org.apache.maven.artifact.resolver.DefaultArtifactResolver.resolve(DefaultArtifactResolver.java:541)
at org.apache.maven.repository.legacy.LegacyRepositorySystem.resolve(LegacyRepositorySystem.java:325)
at org.apache.maven.DefaultProjectDependenciesResolver.resolve(DefaultProjectDependenciesResolver.java:152)
at org.apache.maven.DefaultProjectDependenciesResolver.resolve(DefaultProjectDependenciesResolver.java:66)
at org.apache.maven.lifecycle.DefaultLifecycleExecutor.resolveProjectDependencies(DefaultLifecycleExecutor.java:378)
at org.apache.maven.lifecycle.DefaultLifecycleExecutor.execute(DefaultLifecycleExecutor.java:307)
at org.apache.maven.DefaultMaven.doExecute(DefaultMaven.java:245)
at org.apache.maven.DefaultMaven.execute(DefaultMaven.java:102)
at org.apache.maven.cli.MavenCli.execute(MavenCli.java:423)
at org.apache.maven.cli.MavenCli.doMain(MavenCli.java:158)
at org.apache.maven.cli.MavenCli.main(MavenCli.java:123)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
at org.codehaus.plexus.classworlds.launcher.Launcher.launchEnhanced(Launcher.java:290)
at org.codehaus.plexus.classworlds.launcher.Launcher.launch(Launcher.java:230)
at org.codehaus.plexus.classworlds.launcher.Launcher.mainWithExitCode(Launcher.java:409)
at org.codehaus.plexus.classworlds.launcher.Launcher.main(Launcher.java:352)
[WARNING] Invalid artifact metadata for projectA:jar:0.4.0: 1 problem was encountered while building the effective model for projectA:0.4.0
[FATAL] Non-resolvable parent POM PARENT:0.1-SNAPSHOT for projectA:0.4.0: Failed to resolve POM for PARENT:0.1-SNAPSHOT due to Missing:
...

The error message was of course correct, since the PARENT project wasn't properly installed in my local repo, and I will now attempt to fix that, but Maven 3 should not have swallowed this stacktrace, because it was totally unclear why transitive dependencies were not resolved (while Project A itself ended up on the classpath of Project B)