I quite like tools.deps, but it is maybe a bit problematic that it is bundled with the Clojure install. Before tools.deps there were no officially sanctioned dependency and project management tool. This is probably why we got both leiningen and eventually boot. Now the bar for choosing something different than tools.deps is probably going to be quite high.

Sadly tools.deps lack the support for reading credentials from a gpg/pgp-encrypted file: https://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/TDEPS-9 This is a shame as I rely on this to keep repository credentials safe. I'm not a fan of the maven master password system.