Snap! You describe my experience exactly. Funny thing is I was originally on ant so I've moved before when I found a real improvement. Gradle wasn't any better than maven.
Exactly my path as well. Was on ant, ant got cumbersome to maintain especially in big projects. Maven came up, "oh let's try that"! "But it's so painfully restrictive!", tried Gradle, eventually noticed that it's the same gunk as ant, just looking less like "programming in XML". Then ended up diving deep enough into Maven to learn how to make it behave and do what I want it to do.
Nowadays, in the most extreme case I write a new Maven plugin. But in 99% of cases I can come up with a solution using existing stuff. It's not always the straightforward solution, but in the long term it's usually better to maintain than what I'd cooked up with an imperative system like Gradle.
Me too. From Ant to Maven long ago. In the beginning it involved still quite some work, making plugins, running Nexus. But since Spring Boot, Maven is for me just a copy/paste activity.
