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: 
No build system is a magic bullet. I find Maven solves more problems than it causes for me, but I'm quite comfortable writing plugins to get round its shortcomings, I also deal with hundreds of projects, so Maven's inheritance and dependency processing is quite helpful for me.

Browse SO a bit and you'll see Buildr and Gradle both have issues too (same for Ant and Ivy), generally you're trading one set of problems for another and its a case of finding the least painful.

Is there anything in particular that is bothering you about Maven or is it a general itch? If it is a particular problem it is worth looking at the [Maven 3 issues on Jira](http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG), if the problem isn't addressed, you can raise it, or else there may be little point in you waiting
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.