Forrest is an awful project. You start out dispassionately criticising it on a weblog, but people respond so reasonably and encouragingly on the list that you find yourself sucked into helping ;)
Some good discussion was had on forrest-dev following my rant. See threads here and here. It turns out that forrestbot can be used to build new projects. While this is more a side-effect than it's original intention, it's better than nothing. A page describing how to use forrestbot in a new project has been added.
I also wrote a script, acorn.xml, which can be used to bootstrap a project's use of Forrest.
Based on this, I'm now working on a Maven Forrest plugin. I've got a basic version working by simply wrapping acorn.xml. The hope is that it's possible to have one Ant script, used for invoking Forrest from the command-line, and then both Centipede and Maven can provide wrappers around this script.
I hope to have this working in the next few days, and then get back to Anteater.