To second Robert's point, if the goal is simply to
use MASON, then I don't foresee any complication with having students download the MASON jar and use it as a pre-compiled external library with whatever IDE you/they prefer.
This approach would only cause problems for people who prefer to create their models right inside the "apps/" directory of the MASON source tree—but that always struck me as a strange practice anyway (since it means that every client application becomes an extension of MASON itself). The tutorial in the MASON manual only requires that MASON can be found in your classpath.
Siggy