Upgraded to the latest spray-client version, which includes the new HttpClient architecture. Also did yet another major refactoring of the structure. Still looking for the best design but still getting closer :)
Moved the old benchmarking application.conf settings to the test/resources/application.conf because reference.conf should only contains library-specific default settings
Changed the type of the value contained within a RiakValue to String since that what it mostly is and that what you mostly want it to be (to begin with).

Byte array conversion is now done in the conversion to/from HttpRequest/HttpResponse
Added some initial steps to write back the value after a conflict has been resolved but ran into a design issue that I'll discuss with the feedback group tomorrow
Fixed potential bug in the way we create an AkkaSystem when none is specified to prevent creating multiple ones with the same name
Upgraded to the latest Spray nightly build
Implemented correct behaviour for resolving conflicts and writing the result back to riak
Added unit test for conflict resolution and fixed the bugs that inevitably revealed.

No support for setting bucket properties yet so for now I've set the relevant test bucket properties manually. Added TODO and signatures for bucket property support