It seems to me that it would be really useful to have the dependencies of a jar listed in its Manifest, possibly as an optional field. Without this feature, it is near impossible to know what a jar depends on, without finding it on the web somewhere, or using a dependency management tool, or something along those lines. Now that everyone is using the whole artifact ID, group ID, version convention, I would imagine this would greatly simplify the tools needed to setup a project.
I find myself needing to use maven more than I would like to because it's such a hassle to figure out if something needs Apache commons or logging or whatever the case may be, why not just have the jars listed in some Manifest Field?