Ok sorry I got it wrong earlier, we are also rather on a variant of Core Apps 1.7 (not 1.8).
So I created a starting point for this branch 1.7.x here. This would be 1.7.1-SNAPSHOT.
I went off the last commit before Core Apps was made 2.0-compatible while bringing in multiple additional submodules, and I also got rid of the dependency on the distro (in the exact same way as it is done now on master.) And I made sure that this builds fine out of an empty .m2 
@dkayiwa, what would be the next step(s) to move this to the /openmrs GitHub repo instead of ours? I don’t think I have any write access right now.
@insiderish, let me know your thoughts.