I'm not sure if it's a model thing or just that software has bugs, but lots of people really dislike Maven. Not sure it's an example of a good package manager.

Do they hate the package management or the build tool? Maven introduced a new package format (the Project Object Model, pom.xml) at the same time as introducing a very declarative build tool.

The really confusing part is that the two are conflated by design: if building with Maven, your project's pom.xml also contains the declarative Maven configuration used to build your package, instead of containing just the package metadata (name, dependencies, etc). But that's not required, and it need not be part of the *.pom XML file deployed in the published package.

Since release, many build tools have been introduced that can consume and produce POM-compatible packages but don't require you to use Maven itself as your builder (Ivy for Ant, gradle for writing build scripts in Groovy, SBT for Scala, etc).

Just a note: you can use Gradle for Java too. I haven't built a Java project without Gradle since like 2010 or so.

Yeah sorry if I wasn't clear, in Gradle the build script is written in Groovy. It is used to build any number of project types.

Gradle build scripts can also be written in Kotlin.

I spent yesterday trying to get protobuffers working in maven, see http://vlkan.com/blog/post/2015/11/27/maven-protobuf/ for the pain.

Anything counter to maven's way is a PITA. In this case, Maven dislikes platform specific binaries.

The CLI is among the least intuitive I’ve ever used, and pom.xml is pretty verbose and complex. That being said, it works very well and I’ve never had a problem with it (other than it’s aesthetics) after grokking it.

Technically yes, on the usability part there's still a long way to go...