However, I don't understand why you mix two things: maven concept and design (which is fine) with what I criticized: a build tool that depends on everything that it intends to build in the first place.
Of course, I am looking at this far from the battle-field, so maybe I am being too non-chalant.
Why package Maven anyway? You aren't likely to add much value by doing that.
But not, it is the obsession to turn everything into agnostic "engines" and meta-somethings, where everything is abstracted to the extreme with little value. At the end, Maven implementation using XML, plugins, dependency injection and having a build dependency chain of 100 packages did not prevent them from being kind of stuck in version 3 and slowly abandoned for another tool (gradle), leaving behind the only important value: conventions and the repository concept.
I can build/bootstrap ant and ivy just fine. And I can build almost every package using it by just telling them, don't go to the network, but use the one I already built myself with little effort.
If you ask why maven had to be packaged, mostly because it had to be patched with ugly hacks.