Maven

With some recent projects I have been instructed to use Maven to fetch and build software. I was struck by how hard it was to do anything and how much time I spent faffing with the build environment rather than doing anything productive!

I felt like I was back in the 70's building some mainframe UNIX OS - not trying to build some trivial open source library for Java!

Is it just me or does Maven represent a massive step backwards? Here are my pet gripes (in no particular order)

1. Centralised software "catalogue" - I don't think this is a good idea for the same reason library catalogues suck. One man's "popular fiction" is another man's "crime novel" etc. How can you find stuff?
2. It is full of very deep voodoo parameters (so are most builds) and settings files spread liberally around the filesystem
3. It fails in some spectacularly unhelpful ways
4. When you read the documentation and support forums - most of the focus is on nursing the beast into just working. Surely it working should be a "no brainer"... only when I want to fiddle with stuff do I need to read the detail?

Maybe I am just looking at a bad example project that does not use the tool correclty? But I can't help but think: what does this tool do for my build environment that a decent build document and a set of human friendly tools (an IDE?) don't.

Can I more easily set up new team members with a productive build environment? Is it faster than copying a Virtual PC image and clicking "start"?