Well, I guess I wouldn't say it was ugly.  That's a little harsh :-)  But the JUnit tests probably shined the light on some things that could be improved.  The most important thing was getting it working.  And since it does work, it's an excellent jumping off point!

I'm not that familiar with maven plugin development.  So I was unsure as to what the side effects of changing the visibility of methods would be.  But, it seemed to me that method visibility was purely a preference in this case.  So rather than work around it with reflection, I just flipped the switch to public.  That way I was able to eliminate those areas and focus on other areas during my development.