You'll hit that with Gradle, Ivy, Leiningen, SBT and Buildr too.
> The biggest problem, imho, is that it's inflexible. You can't just (easily) throw in a bit of functionality or make an unusual tweak to your build. So, if you can't find an existing plugin to do what you need, you have to write it yourself.
I'd also call that it's biggest strength. Maven POMs are only ever declarative. I've never hit a FOSS project using Maven that I couldn't build, but I've hit plenty using SBT or Ant that I had to tweak to build.
> I've written a maven plugin, and the documentation/support was rather poor.
I had the same experience with Gradle's DSL documentation, although having a look at it now, they've dramatically improved it since then.
"Probably"? "Thrown in"? Perhaps you can cut and paste build scripts between Gradle projects, but write anything more than "a few lines" in Groovy and you're looking at huge maintenance problems, like something that evaluated as ["abc", "defg", "hij"] suddenly becoming ['a', 'b', 'c'] for reasons that become apparent only after hours of printing debug messages.
Weird.
Verbose and unreadable are not contradictory descriptions. In fact, they are more complementary descriptions -- there is a reason that in natural languages one of the most frequent recommendations for clear and readable writing is to be concise.
Excess verbosity is bad for readability.
Why?
I think after a while one gets tired of using XML as a configuration language. It's verbose and not the easiest to read. Beyond that, we used to find ourselves in dependency hell with maven pretty frequently, though that hasn't happened to me in a few years.
The biggest problem, imho, is that it's inflexible. You can't just (easily) throw in a bit of functionality or make an unusual tweak to your build. So, if you can't find an existing plugin to do what you need, you have to write it yourself.
I've written a maven plugin, and the documentation/support was rather poor. I also found myself having to use an older version of various plugin libraries in order to write proper tests for the plugin. It took me a couple of weeks. Had I done all that in Gradle, I could have just thrown in a few lines of groovy and probably finished in a day.
That said, it's stable and well known. Gradle seems to have the momentum and increasing mindshare, but you probably won't get fired for using maven.