Some friends have told me that Maven is a bit like NetBeans: both suffer from a certain stigma that was once deserved but no longer entirely valid. I hated Maven 1.x due to a lack of documentation and due to XML/Jelly.
The latter issue may be resolved, as Maven 2 is much more Java-oriented. The stigma of poor documentation remains, but I don't know if it is fair. (If it is still fair, then the Maven team has truly dropped the ball.)
Both the POM and dependency management are cool ideas, but one wonders if they will be assimilated by a newer tool, in the same way that C++ led the way to newer languages.
A final note: the dichotomy between Ant and Maven is somewhat false. Gradle and Gant are build tools in the Groovy space that have a lot to offer, even for straight-up Java projects. Because they use Groovy, the simple tasks are truly simple (in contrast to the painful XML constructions in Ant); yet they have strong integration with Ant, so there is a rich set of "hard" tasks.
