Provide Mechanism to Resolve "provided"- and "test"-scoped transitives, and "optional"

We currently support only the default Maven behavior with respect to the resolution of transitive dependencies as documented by:

http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-dependency-mechanism.html

In particular, it's currently impossible to resolve "provided" and "test" scope transitives, as well as those marked "optional". Ales has provided a use case which shall act as the basis for this feature request.