It is desirable to be able to retrieve a skeletal model that can be constructed relatively fast but may not have all details fully fleshed out.

The specific use case that I have in mind is a project import wizard. The wizard allows the user to choose a root project folder. It then presents the user with a tree view of the project hierarchy and lets the user choose which projects / subprojects they are interested in actually importing into their Eclipse workspace.

Unfortunately with the current version of the API obtaining just the project hierarchy leads to downloading every dependency of each project in the hierarchy. This is blocking the UI for a long time (example, when retrieving the model for spring-integration, it can take more than 6 minutes).

Even if we are able to show the best possible progress information, blocking the wizard for 6 minutes is simply not acceptable.

Once I have picked and imported the projects I am interested in... it is fine for the IDE to take whatever time is needed to have the fully fleshed out models constructed in background as part of a workspace build, but it is not acceptable to do this inside the wizard.