I admit I'm entertained by your use of the word "since." Maven 3 is still beta. When it gets released and adopted I fully believe it will be great. I won't be depending on it until it is ready for prime time.

I do wonder if Maven 3's flexibility will hurt it or help it in the long run. Yes pom.xml is XML, but at least there is only one dialect. If team A likes XML and team B likes Groovy, development manager C will have a fun time getting them to work together on project D.

And Clojure :-)