I have never stressed over or debugged Leiningen in my 6 years of Clojure experience.

Not sure what you're on about.

deps can't produce stable builds as it insists dependencies are not ordered. Yet on the classpath they are. That order shouldn't matter, but it very well does.

lein AFAIK produces the same classpath every time.

deps: Maybe put the paths first and then let's gamble what a seq on a map produces...