For all the java devs who can scape maven insanity exists ivy.
Personally I've always found Maven to be a pain, but a necessary evil for larger projects / teams. I've tried using it for smaller personal projects and the benefit wasn't worth the time invested.
I'd rather not invest more time learning Ivy / Gradle / anything else until someone can convince me it's not the same old crap under a different label...
The Gradle overview at http://www.gradle.org/overview says "The Gradle design is well-suited for creating another build script engine in JRuby or Jython. It just doesn't have the highest priority for us at the moment."
Perhaps if Gradle easily enabled any JVM language to be used, there'd be far greater uptake. There's a few of us out here who don't like using Groovy.