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.
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 ;)