It deserves the reputation it has got. Not everyone needs the rigid structure that Maven's developers thought is appropriate for every single project. It is so inflexible.
And what is 'Pro' for many people, the dependency management, is IMHO its biggest 'con'. I am absolutely not comfortable with maven downloading the jars from the network and lose my sleep over incompatibilities (yea, the offline mode exists, but then why should I have all those hundreds of xml files and checksums). I decide which libraries I use and many projects have serious concerns about builds dependant on network connection.
Further worse, when things do not work, you are absolutely lost. The documentation sucks, the community is clueless.
