Question: I am really tired of struggling with Maven 2 all the time. Build tools should not be in the way. Recently I have been looking at Buildr and Gradle. Maven 3 seems to fix some of the struggles. So, what should I go for now? Buildr? Gradle? Or wait a year for Maven 3?

Answer: 
**maven 3.x is already embedded in IDEs** (at least on netbeans, check [this link](http://www.scribd.com/doc/14458957/Jasons-Maven-3-Presentation) for more infomration). You can play today with maven 3.x simply building a Maven project with netbeans.

Another nice news is that maven got more 'enterprise' support with integrating EJB/WS in IDE projects (again, at least on netbeans).

So I would stick to maven 2.x for production builds and play with maven 3.x for development.
Give Lattice <https://github.com/hackingspirit/Lattice> a try. I am the author. Here is the scoop:

In Lattice build files are written not in XML, but in the Python language. The ben- efits are much better readability and powerful imperative build scripting supported by Python.
For multi-module projects. Lattice uses topological sorting to decide the correct order to build each module. It’s also planned that Lattice will analyze the module dependency to determine how the module compilation can be parallelized.
Lattice’s source code is extremely lean, currently it consists of about 500 lines of Python source code.