The head is venturing out of the ass

For the longest time, I've had my head up my ass: I've been content to build my projects with ant and the (very few) ant targets I've really needed: reports, xmlbeans and hibernate. (And fiddling around with jspc to precompile my JSPs). But now I've found that using Xdoclet2 for Hibernate is no longer acceptable since a certain bug has forced me away from it, and now I'm finding that it's time to move on to real build systems like Maven2. I've been scared away from it before by the fact that I've heard that it's exceedingly poorly documented and that it's been a total pain and has load of incompatibilities, but apparently it's been getting better and now I'm forced to learn it in the hopes of saving myself some trouble. I'm also going to have to learn EJB3 Annotations and their Hibernate extensions, but that's another matter. Let's see how it goes.