Maven is great as long as you buy into their philosophy of how builds ought to work - phases and actions happening at a particular phase.

If your build has really custom stuff, and you cannot fit your custom work into those phases (e.g., it interferes with some other custom stuff), then you have a maven problem that's hard to solve. One usually resolve this by writing a maven plugin, and that kinda sucks. But hey, at least if you do it, you can contribute this to the whole plugin ecosystem and thus, improve it for somebody else.