Your second paragraph got to the heart of it. If we want to use some standard build toolchain, it needs to use a nice language and not feel obscure. I was explaining to someone a bash script I wrote, and he said "why not use Python". There were reasons but... he was right, Python would be much easier to use and maintain, and we have a lot more developers who know it.
Eh. It's not my favorite thing out there, but Maven's fine for what it is. It's designed for and explicitly for well-behaved Java artifacts. If your Java artifacts are not well-behaved, you're going to have a bad time--in my experience, most of those cases are doing things you probably shouldn't be doing.
(You may be a wizard and have a reason to do them, for sure--but that's what writing Maven plugins is for. Or not using Maven. You've got choices.)
Given the limitations of the platform, there really isn't a such a thing as a well-behaved JVM library that depends on other libraries, unfortunately. Oracle really dropped the ball by only serving their own needs with the module system.
Can you expand on this? Having done a pretty decent bit of JVM development, I've never really run into issues even doing some not-out-of-the-box stuff.
That said, Maven is incredibly suck-tastic.