We've actually moved away from Maven back to GMake+Ant, precisely because of too many opaque problems with how Maven insists on "handling" dependencies. But then, our build environment is not the standard just-get-everything-from-the-internet project, so most of the assumptions Maven makes are never going to be true (and it should never have been used on this project in the first place).

I'm hoping we can move to Gradle soon. Last time we looked, it still had a few too many "feature still in development" growing pains for us, but it's obviously maturing in a good direction. As long as there are enough places where we can hook in some overrides, I think it's the way to go.