I happen to think that maven is a good idea in principle, but poorly designed. One fundamental issue is that it does not distinguish between what I call 'products' and 'modules'. Modules have transitive dependencies and tend to have a common structure, and products do not.

When you are building a product (e.g. an installer, some documentation, a website ... etc.) with the build tool, what you create is an artifact, that once built you can treat independently of its dependencies. A module is library code, and when you depend on it you implicitly depend on its dependencies as well.

Build languages/dsls are a complete intellectual cul-de-sac. Java is a perfectly acceptable (in fact quite decent) language for doing build tasks. There is nothing in ant that cannot be equally concisely written in java, given the right library support.

I have written more this subject in the articles on the website.

http://www.ebuild-project.org/

The website is not completely upto date, the latest version is 0.8.4.