I'm by-and-large fine with XML, having used it for many a year; however I really like working with XML when I can use Guile's SXML layer. For Maven it's not that important because POMs are simple enough, but for more complex things it's nice having a useful tool.

I actually don't mind Ant very much, but I haven't had good luck using Ivy for dependency management. Maven's been very nice in the decade and a half I've used it, Gradle's always felt off to me. I think there was also another Java build tool written in like Ruby or something, but I'm blanking on the name at the moment.