Building java libraries isn't really all that difficult. Not is packaging them. Damned if it doesn't take 30 lines of XML to do it in maven, but these kinds of see-spot-run situations are pretty easy.
Extremely difficult in maven and five minutes work in make or ant is things like "running LaTeX to generate a PDF of some of your documentation, because it is math laden and HTML isn't suitable". This is not theoretical; I had to do this at the place that was using maven and we depended on some semi-obscure mathematical formalisms like the stable distribution.
Intermediate between these two is driving things with maven plugins, which is either easy (because you're doing something trivial) or fiendishly difficult because the debugging output is terrible, the docs are worse and the only thing left to you is to Use The Source, Luke. Every nontrivial maven plugin I've ever used has tripped this at some point, be it loading config files, including the dependencies, or something else.
Or you could use org.codehaus.mojo:latex-maven-plugin, stick your latex and graphics in src/main/latex/<doc>, and watch it 'just work', like I do.
I agree that not every maven plugin does exactly what you want it to, but a lot of them get pretty damn close, and as the authors iterate them, they gain a lot of flexibility.
I don't have too many issues getting latex running either, but I do mostly agree, despite my humorous aside. If I had a quid for every extra hour that Maven added to my work above and beyond the coding, I could take you all to lunch. Tools should at least attempt to get out of the way. Maven is a Swiss-army knife with a blade as the handle.
