Is there any simple way of generating a report of SCM changes since last
release?
The changelog only takes range, date or tag (which doesn't even work with
svn) as types...

I guess there is no way for maven guess what tag/date belongs to previous
releases or even what the previous release number was?
(which makes this quite hard)

On the other hand, this would be a very sensible functionality to support...
maybe it would be possible to store historic information in the project that
plugins could use? just a thought...