A lot of people dislike it, but Maven was a massive productivity boost. A tool that automatically downloads dependencies, manages their transitive dependencies

A lot of people dislike it, but Maven was a massive productivity boost. A tool that automatically downloads dependencies, manages their transitive dependencies, resolves conflicting artifact versions, is able to check for changes, constructs proper classpath, standardizes builds, compilation, testing, artifact storage and versioning. The onboarding went from days of fiddling to "just download Maven, run mvn install and off you go"