For simple things, I love the way maven builds projects.

If I want to make a "scripty" Java program I can generate a project file from the archetype which sets me up with dependencies I need and an easy way to write tests.

The only thing that will survive from the Maven era is the directory structure. It's the default structure in SBT and many other built tools. It's a little verbose, but it does make sense and I've learned to embrace it.

Maven is terrible. Give SBT or Gradle and try and you'll see just how terrible Maven is. SBT still has its issues (OMG why is everything a macro!), but I still prefer it to trying to build anything in Maven.

I have exactly the opposite view. Until very recently modules in sbt required a scala Build file. There is not one single file where you have a view of everything - plugins, build properties, sbt file, and sbt scala file. I prefer maven over SBT any time of the day. Have not tried Gradle, so cant comment

FWIW - Maven's shade plugin makes self-executing jars very easy.

Except when you're using multiple Spring libraries with XML config and are running on servers without access to the general internet.

I tried all the listed tricks to get the schemas into the shaded jar and none of them worked. So now I have to put big fat warnings in my README.md files that "yes, there's a bunch of errors on startup, and yes, there's a 60 second delay, but you can ignore it".

Spring Boot? I guess it doesn't produce a shaded jar, but I find the custom classloader w/embedded dependency jars to have fewer issues than shaded jars (of course, one disadvantage is you can't run proguard, if that's something you do).