except if you need complexity to do something very specific.

and i do argue that maven has the complexity correctly silo'ed - you need to write a maven plugin to do anything complex and custom, and fit that plugin into the maven ecosystem/api/framework (however deep you need to go).

As opposed to the 'normal' Makefile style build, where you add instructions and scripts (which i think both Ant and gradle inherited the idea from, and thus neither really makes for better builds imho).