In a blog interview Rick Hightower admits that he finds that ant is still ahead of market share with maven. Still he feels that Maven uses a better concept, but the implementation isn’t that great.
My experiences with Maven have been pretty negative. I’ve tried it twice in the past, because I like the concept as well. Both times before I got very far I ran into nasty exceptions and I couldn’t get any further. Despite some expressed interest none of the developers at my company have spent enough time to figure it out and try to sell the rest of us on it.
At the end of the day I only have so much time to keep up with new tools, and Ant works fine despite it’s verbosity. (Maybe Maven 2 will be really good and make me reconsider.)