I made some progress in Rollarcus over the past couple of weekends, but not a lot. This makes me wonder how I ever found the "nights and weekends" to get Roller started in the first place, but that's a different topic.
What I've done so far in Rollarcus is to simplify things. While I was at Sun, we split Roller up into a number of parts: a weblogger part for blogging, a planet part for RSS/Atom aggregation, a core part for things common to both. After Sun, I worked to move Roller to Maven and further split things up into a total of 9 Maven modules including an assembly for building the release. Now, I think that all these modules are unnecessary -- we never shipped a Roller-Planet application and nobody wants to use parts of Roller -- and even if they did, the modules did not really help.
Here's the before view: apache/roller
Here's the after view: snoopdave/rollarcus
So, in Rollerarcus, I've merged all the modules. Except for one "test utilities" module, all Java code, JSPs and other code is now in one module and much easier to deal with. Next, I'm going to attack the (what I consider to be) unnecessary dependencies and drastically reduce the number of jars in WEB-INF.