I've had the opposite experience. I've converted 2-3 complex build systems implemented in different flavors of make to ant. It's tedious but it's doable. And once you get to ant, it's a lot easier to maintain compared to make.

I looked at maven a couple time but could never figure out how to convert a make-based build to maven because there is always a bunch of weird hacks lurking in the makefile. However, I do see how maven would be fine for a new project.