m2 --display-profiles switch that will show all possible profiles from the pom, its parents, and transitive dependencies.
features to disable transient profiles in a deployment/release scenario to ensure the build is pure.

Original Requirements

offer a replacement for ./build.properties (the per user, per pom override, and the per user global override)
filtering of resources
different repositories
- for deployment (dev, test, qa, production)
- for dependency resolution (different use of snapshots mostly)
- affect on local repository
plexus application use case (having a generated test runtime, and a release runtime with different settings)
m2 development use case (switching local repository, m2 home and settings by profile)
changes to dependencies (allowing jdk specific, operating system specific, debugging built versions of libraries)
modifications to the modules built (not convinced on this yet - http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-354^{Image Removed})
different configuration per user/profile (http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/maven-dev/200504.mbox/%3c1114638565.5813.422.camel@172.16.1.36%3e^{Image Removed})
- eg local system paths for certain plugins
some profiles are for a user (ie the build.properties replacements), others would be committed to SCM. These might even be shared across projects
there is a definite analogy to settings.xml

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