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: 
I think people complaining about Maven should spend a little extra time investigating available plugins. In response to comments complaining that Maven is rigid and makes it hard to use custom build logic / provide fine-grained control over the build process - I would recommend looking into Ant plug-in for Maven (there are actually several, but here is one: <http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-antrun-plugin>). I have had great success customizing Maven builds with it over the years. Basically, it allows you to run any Ant command as part of the Maven build, and you can do pretty much anything with Ant ;)
Ant with Ivy does the same dependency management Maven does (in fact, it uses Maven's whole dependency management infrastructure including the same URL repositories), but without all the POM configuration mess.

Ant with Ivy might be a way of handling the dependency issues for people who really don't want to use Maven. It solves 90% of the stuff that Maven was suppose to solve.