Perhaps I'm judging it according to an unfair standard, and I certainly don't have the intention of getting into a language war. However, I personally view Maven (including but not limited to its config files) as quite insane.
When compared to, for instance, NPM or Ruby Gems, I can't honestly say I've found much to like about the Java ecosystem. Part of the problem, of course, is that unlike in the case of the aforementioned two, build & dependency management in Java-land is quite fragmented (ant, maven, gradle, etc.).
