If you want to do something simple it takes a 60 line pom.xml to express it. If you want to do something a little trickier it takes another 60 lines and three hours minimum of poking around at inadequately written docs. If you want to do something difficult, forget it. Ant, which is a nightmare of usability and continues to make me wake in the middle of the night screaming, is at least as complex to configure, better documented and is not a quarter as constrained as Maven.

That said the Maven dependency model isn't too bad; fortunately you don't have to adopt Maven to get it, you can just use Ivy.