Would you consider this request to remove all .project, .classpath and .settings/

and add them to .gitignore ?  I'm proposing this because I'm getting a lot of diff
in these files after a fresh clone, even without having changing anything yet,
perhaps due to my use of M2E with Tycho support?

No offense taken either if you think this is stupid and not really viable - in that case
I'd re-try using your projects without M2E with Tycho support active.