I fight with maven every day. I was just being snarky, the fact is maven can be abused in the same way anything can. Gulp gets insane when people start writing opaque custom tasks. Maven gets insane when people write opaque plugins. Nothing is perfect. Although people tell me Gradle is...
Maven is as close to perfect as it gets, IME. Certainly a lot more so than gradle. Insane plugins are a probem, but since plugins are first-class code you can solve that the same way you'd solve insanity in your actual codebase.
