I am doing solo part time development (1 day/week) on a very large orphaned enterprise system. The builds are done using maven. The build takes about 15 minutes because maven is going off to various sites looking for no longer supported versions. I removed the dependencies; not much improvement. I tried mvn -o and the build dropped to 3 minutes. But war file was broken in mysterious ways. The currently irreducible step is 6 minutes to make a war out of a half-dozen project wars. So tossing maven is an urgent item on my plate.

The attractive part of maven is that it manages all the version dependencies for a large development team. For a solo developer it is way too much pain.