Driven by the same necessity I've forked the maven-deploy-plugin plugin from GitHub doing changes in order to exclude a specific attached artifact from deploy as follow:
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-deploy-plugin</artifactId>
<version>3.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
<configuration>
<skipAttachedArtifacts>
<artifact>
<groupId>com.sample</groupId>
<artifactId>something</artifactId>
<version>${project.version}</version>
<packaging>jar</packaging>
<classifier>shaded</classifier>
</artifact>
</skipAttachedArtifacts>
</configuration>
</plugin>
Currently using the maven-deploy-plugin plugin with skip parameter set to true all artifacts are excluded from deploy while target here is to exclude only a specific one from the attached ones. On my fork I've introduced the skipAttachedArtifacts configuration parameter in order to specify attached artifacts to exclude from deploy.
Here is the link on my forked project on GitHub:
https://github.com/gregorycallea/maven-deploy-plugin
Here the link instead to the pull request I've submitted on apache plugin project:
https://github.com/apache/maven-deploy-plugin/pull/3