It might just be newer people to Java development with Ant and Maven hell. Frameworks like Play are ridding the bulkiness of setups like that. But still they are a large part of the infrastructure of Java.
Am I the only person in the world who likes Maven? I am a hipster Ruby on Rails dev by day (the type who should loathe Maven), but in a past job I had to use Maven, and I really like how various details about the project (name, version, dependencies) are well defined. Writing plugins isn't easy to get started, but once over the initial hurdle, it's nice to have those things specified.
Comparing to Rake, I'm currently trying to create a rake task to create a custom package (non-gem). I don't even get a project name for free. I've got to ask the user to pass in the name (or a Gemspec object perhaps).
Is the objection to the mass of XML? Or to Maven itself? I can understand the former, but I really think Maven is a well engineered system...
It's more of a love hate thing, it is pretty powerful but it becomes a problem with very long build processes in my experience on big teams. I actually like Maven personally and more so like stuff like SCons: http://www.scons.org/. It seems more common platform rather than so tuned to Java like Maven.
Just in my experience every software project I have been on with Java that used maven had an immense build process. I am not kidding one system I worked on the tests alone within it took about 45 minutes per day just to get started. Maybe it is too powerful, and yes part of that is the xml/enterprise feel of Java and guilty by association.
