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?
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, if the problem isn't addressed, you can raise it, or else there may be little point in you waiting