2. You may not like Maven--I hate it too--but it's how things are done. In practice the only people complaining about installing libraries and managing jar dependencies are people using ant without ivy. 90% of folks just use Maven and get on with it.
3. You're turning your complaint from "Java's XML support is weak" to "Java's XML support isn't Pythonic like Python's." This is a weak argument. You're saying you want to live the Python dream in Javaland. Well, it isn't going to happen, no matter what the Play guys tell you. But if you have to use Java--and sometimes you do--adding four lines to your maven config--which you will have--so you can use EE 6 or JAXB is not a big deal, and neither is putting a few annotations on a class.
I don't love Java. In fact I dislike it. I would rather be using Haskell, Python, or Ruby. Or any number of other things. But you can't be mad at Java for being Java and not Python.
That's by default in maven - you have to do something really stupid to get non-repeatable builds (usually involves specifying open version ranges or some weird plugin magic)
>everyone who's forked my git repo can still build the code if the Maven URL's for the deps have gone out of business
One of the main advantages of maven is just the opposite of that - you don't have to bundle your dependencies and get them to other people - they can just ask maven to fetch them. And maven is not going away.
I think they changed it now but for years the default behaviour was to get the latest versions of every plugin, making builds non-repeatable by default.
This got me up to speed pretty quickly to learn JAX-RS providing XML and JSON.
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2. Maven is a nightmare too. Every time I've used it (usually because I'm compiling someone else's code and they wrote the build in maven), it downloads hundreds of megabytes of who-knows-what from random Internet sites. I want to pin versions of dependencies (and dependencies-of-dependencies) so my builds are repeatable, and I want to be sure everyone who's forked my git repo can still build the code if the Maven URL's for the deps have gone out of business. I recall trying to read the Maven manual, but both the manual and the concepts were incomprehensible -- there's so much automagic, when things break, it's difficult to even come up with a hypothesis of what might be going wrong. (And anyone who has any experience with any build system knows that the build always breaks.)
I usually just use Ant. It's a bit of a pain shuttling jar's around (symlinks help), but at least I can understand the build.
3. Part of the problem is that I don't want this alphabet soup of technologies. If I'm running in Python, and I'm developing a prototype or a one-off hack, I just write a file called whatever.py. (I can "import json" in whatever.py if I don't want to use hacks like eval()/repr() or copy-and-paste for parsing/serializing.)
I want to be able to build a quick one-file prototype to process my XML, without enabling the "Java EE 6 web profile" (whatever that is) and writing a Maven build file. I want using XML to be this simple:
And Java's XML handling just isn't that simple, whereas Python's JSON handling is.