You can crap on Java all you like, but it takes a real weirdo to prefer autotools over maven.
I think it really comes down to how well you the know the tool. You can take the nastiest most esoteric language and compare it to a truly beautiful one, and still prefer the former if you know it well. I've experienced this personally with bash for example. Bash is a gross language, but I love it because I know it really well. Elixir is a beautiful language, but I'm a total newb at it still and so I prefer bash to elixir.
Anyway, thanks for the lols :-)
Since Java enterprise applications can easily live on for a decade or more, it is important that they not be "clever" and be easy to maintain. Developers can come and go. New team members should be able to dive into and grok the code right away.
Fortunately however the awk scripts that I hack in my down time are not even usually saved. It would be much like criticizing people who play regex golf because the regexes can be hard to understand. That code is never meant to be used for anything other than the immediate satisfaction it brings. If anyone ever did see them, it would be because they either hacked me, or I showed it to them related to some conversation about awk scripts.
However I also disagree on the definition of the word clever wrt workplace. I often consider the simplest and most straightforward implementation to be the most clever. Anyone can write impenetrable code that confuses people. Not many people can solve the problem at hand in an elegant, simple fashion.
While autotools mostly solves a very hard problem using several strategies and tactics that has come to prove themselves over time in that space, and outside of autotools, many of the implementation choices are absolutely puzzling. M4, the general weirdness of things, and not to mention the 10k+ lines of auto generated shell scripts to probe for features.
I've never loved maven, but at least it's insanity is rather symmetric.
Also, be careful not to confused "over-engineered" with "works correctly in the face of edge cases". autotools manages to be over-engineered and somehow is still not very robust. (Try using autotools on POSIX-compliant but not-very-unixy systems like QNX if you don't believe me.)