I've never had any issue nor felt that Maven is overly complicated so far having done a few large projects with minimum Maven overhead (i.e.: haven't had the ne

I've never had any issue nor felt that Maven is overly complicated so far having done a few large projects with minimum Maven overhead (i.e.: haven't had the need to customize it). I do agree with you that XML makes programmability aspect of it a little bit more complex than it should be (you still can write plugins if you have to, as opposed to use XML).