agree fully. IF you are doing something remotely common, chances are theres already a maven plugin that does it. It might have bugs, but chances are, the plugin is also opensource, so its no worse than you writing it yourself than having to fix the bug(s) you encounter.
The only reason i don't like maven is not because of its rigidity, but because of its network dependence. To use maven, you really need to run your own repository server, and that comes with huge overheads. I m warming up to the idea of always mandating offline mode in maven, and then check in to the scm a preloaded repository which includes all the libs and plugins for your project, and never have to worry about external repos, or network connectivity.
I used to be really annoyed by that too, but I'm not any more. It's _really important_ in commercial software development to understand where your code comes from. Having a local repository act as a gatekeeper does a nice job of that. It's a good idea to always have builds run where maven settings force use of a local repository. You can then easily track everything that's going into builds, and scale that up over larger numbers of projects.
You can also push libraries into the repository that aren't open source, and know that you've done so.
Running a maven repository doesn't take much. Sonatype's basic offerings are fine and quite effective.
I think that's an interesting concern, but you might be in a different enviornment than I am.
If "network dependence" is an issue for you, you could check in your ~/.m2 directory iff you don't want to run a repository server and you're deploying to many machines that have access to source control (which you probably do if you're running maven on that machine) and you don't have access to the internet. Then it's almost like a Ant 'lib' directory type of build, but with version information, docs, and sources all available if you want it and easily refreshed when you do have network access.
I thought that, then I installed nexus and let it proxy the remote repositories and really haven't looked back. Takes some time to setup (few hours). But makes life so much easier that it's well worth the effort, especially that with Java you WILL have a dependency on a 3rd party jar from Oracle that for whatever reason won't ever show up in maven central or want to include some other 3rd party repository.
The only reason i don't like maven is not because of its rigidity, but because of its network dependence. To use maven, you really need to run your own repository server, and that comes with huge overheads. I m warming up to the idea of always mandating offline mode in maven, and then check in to the scm a preloaded repository which includes all the libs and plugins for your project, and never have to worry about external repos, or network connectivity.