Your plugin has to play by the rules, which is a good thing.
Maven's useful for more than the beginning of a project. If you're working on real-world software, you're probably not the only person who has to understand your bespoke build, if that's the way that you've chosen to go.
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/586202/best-practices-for...
I know that Maven is ultimately capable of being used to copy a file. However, there are multiple ways to do this because all of the options have limitations and are somewhat awkward to use. For instance, I don't think resource plugin you linked to supports renaming as part of the copy.
Why is using your build to push files to a remote server a problem? A common use would be to deploy local code to an environment that simulates production. If that cannot be done as part of the build then it will exist as scripts that exist outside of the build. This means that there will probably be a lot more 'reinventing the wheel'.
"I have config files and various documents that I want to copy from the dev environment to the dev-server directory using Maven2."
To mean a remote dev-server and then maven-upload was mentioned in the list of solutions. Let me step back a bit.
Maven is primarily interested in the process of building. There are functions that allow deployment but generally that is not Maven's domain. Using Maven as part of your deployment process is definitely going to be at odds with a smooth experience. I think of it like making non-default choices in Ruby on Rails, you are asking for pain.
As to your point about "reinventing the wheel" for deployment using maven, I would suggest that there are many tools designed for deployment and would use those instead, like cap.
I agree that the process of building should be the primary focus of a build tool. I also, think that the secondary purpose is to make development easier. That is why you do 'rake rails' instead of having to use cap to deploy your changes locally. It's not that hard to come across a scenario that falls in to one of these goals that requires custom logic (like copying a file, or something similar). Some of this should go in custom plugins so it can be reused. However, some of it is small and non-generic and makes no sense as a plugin. The solution you pointed to for copying a file involves substantially more code to include and configure the plugin than it would take in other JVM build tools (such as SBT or Gradle) to simply specify that you want to copy a file.
I agree that doing deployment for final builds or to shared environments are better served by a different tool.
The only reason i don't like maven is not because of its rigidity, but because of its network dependence. To use maven, you really need to run your own repository server, and that comes with huge overheads. I m warming up to the idea of always mandating offline mode in maven, and then check in to the scm a preloaded repository which includes all the libs and plugins for your project, and never have to worry about external repos, or network connectivity.
You can also push libraries into the repository that aren't open source, and know that you've done so.
Running a maven repository doesn't take much. Sonatype's basic offerings are fine and quite effective.
If "network dependence" is an issue for you, you could check in your ~/.m2 directory iff you don't want to run a repository server and you're deploying to many machines that have access to source control (which you probably do if you're running maven on that machine) and you don't have access to the internet. Then it's almost like a Ant 'lib' directory type of build, but with version information, docs, and sources all available if you want it and easily refreshed when you do have network access.