It's awesome and other tools (bundler) are copying it or build on top of it (gradle, buildr, Ivy repo). XML is horrible, not Maven.

Python tools don't even come close. Ditto with .NET NuGet. Find me a tool that can compare feature by feature with Maven and still relevant for a long time.

I've always said: "With Java plus XML, you can have one language for the price of two."

With Java, you write a lot of syntax to get static typing, but it's worth it because static typing! Then you throw static typing away (because now it's to restrictive I suppose?) to use XML files which must be structured a certain unpredictable way or you'll cry at the traceback you receive, and pray your imminent Google search can make sense of it all.

Nobody with any sense uses XML in Java anymore. Everything uses annotations now.

Well, your responses mostly amount to "OMG, I hate Java coders / everything there sucks" etc. Not really insightful.