Figuring out package dependencies is really not that hard. You rarely do it anyway. Probably once during project setup and few more during upgrades. With maven you’ll end up fixing mismatched dependencies, badly written poms, and doing package exclusions anyway.
Not that hard… for toy projects. But the projects I work on have many, really many, of them, and I’m very glad to get them transitively, to have a standardized naming scheme for them. Managing all this manually by hand would be a nightmare.
And yes, sometimes you have to work on the convergence of dependencies. But think about it twice, this is not inherent to Maven, this is inherent to any system using dependencies (and I am talking about Java dependencies in general here).
So with Ant, you have to do the same work except that you have to do everything manually: grabbing some version of project A and its dependencies, grabbing some version of project B and its dependencies, figuring out yourself what exact versions they use, checking that they don’t overlap, checking that they are not incompatible, etc. Welcome to hell.
On the other hand, Maven supports dependency management and will retrieve them transitively for me and gives me the tooling I need to manage the complexity inherent to dependency management: I can analyze a dependency tree, control the versions used in transitive dependencies, exclude some of them if required, control the converge across modules, etc. There is no magic. But at least you have support.
And don’t forget that dependency management is only a small part of what Maven offers, there is much more (not even mentioning the other tools that integrates nicely with Maven, e.g. Sonar).
Slow FIX-COMPILE-DEPLOY-DEBUG cycle, which kills productivity. This is my main gripe. You make a change, the you have to wait for maven build to kick in and wait for it to deploy. No hot deployment whatsoever.
First, why do you use Maven like this? I don’t. I use my IDE to write tests, code until they pass, refactor, deploy, hot deploy and run a local Maven build when I’m done, before to commit, to make sure I will not break the continuous build.
Second, I’m not sure using Ant would make things much better. And to my experience, modular Maven builds using binary dependencies gives me faster build time than typical monolithic Ant builds. Anyway, have a look at Maven Shell for a ready to (re)use Maven environment (which is awesome by the way).
So at end, and I’m sorry to say so, it’s not really Maven that is killing your productivity, it’s you misusing your tools. And if you’re not happy with it, well, what can I say, don’t use it. Personally, I’m using Maven since 2003 and I never looked back.