Maven dependencies are frustrating

It seems like a maven-based project defaults to "no dependencies" until all of the pom files have been processed, every time a project is opened.

Is it possible to record the dependency information in the intellij project, and trust it until it's shown to be incorrect?

Currently I can't use my project at all until Intellij is done with all the "Reading whatever.pom" background tasks. I'd prefer that IntelliJ trusted the classpath and dependencies from the ipr and iml files.
I'd at least be able to edit and debug unless I had made changes to the pom structure outside of IntelliJ.