Both are pretty over-engineered, but Maven has a drastically reduced "I want to pull all my hair out" factor. Also, be careful not to confused "over-engineered

Both are pretty over-engineered, but Maven has a drastically reduced "I want to pull all my hair out" factor. Also, be careful not to confused "over-engineered" with "works correctly in the face of edge cases". autotools manages to be over-engineered and somehow is still not very robust. (Try using autotools on POSIX-compliant but not-very-unixy systems like QNX if you don't believe me.)