This is similar to this discussion: http://devnet.jetbrains.net/message/5470833?tstart=0, but it seems a little unreasonable to have to upgrade to IntelliJ 12 when this was working fine with 11.1.3. When I updated to 11.1.4, grails plugins suddenly were no longer resolved. The plugins list is empty in IntelliJ now, no matter how many times I synchronize Grails settings. Output of synchronize grails settings is attached.
I have tried to specify grails.work.dir as an absolute path, which also does not work. It appears that 11.1.4 ignores plugins completely as far as I can tell.