We explore the link between dependence abstractions and maximal parallelism extraction in nested loops. Our goal is to find, for each dependence abstraction, the minimal transformations needed for maximal parallelism extraction. The result of this paper is that Allen and Kennedy's algorithm is optimal when dependences are approximated by dependence levels. This means that even the most sophisticated algorithm cannot detect more parallelism than found by Allen and Kennedy's algorithm, as long as dependence level is the only information available. In other words, loop distribution is sufficient for detecting maximal parallelism in dependence graphs with levels.