"Until you get your head around the idea that you're describing "what" you're building rather than how to build it, you'll feel an impedance mismatch."

Trust me, us maven haters understand declarative programming just fine. There is no impedence mismatch. Maven the build tool is simply an inferior solution with several superior alternatives. After discovering Buildr, I've never wanted to go back to Maven, and I'm willing to trust that Gradle (Groovy), Leiningen (Clojure), and SBT (Scala), are all also superior to Maven while integrating well with Maven's dependency system.