Why do so few people use Maven? Are there alternative tools?

I like Maven and use it almost exclusively in my company. But I'd justify my reasons for doing so:

1. I run a team of developers and we need structure. I need most of my developers to follow a certain set of conventions down to project layouts. This is to make it easier for handovers when attrition occurs.
2. Maven archetypes are a major blessing in this regard. The seniors would just create specific archetypes for certain project templates which all developers just base their projects on. There's a really simple generic one for those cases where we didn't manage to cater for. Checking out an ant-based layout from SVN is less intuitive in this regard as the developer will still need to remove the original .svn metadata once it's checked out.
3. Maven helps us remain IDE-agnostic. I don't want to base any of my hiring policies on what IDE the developer prefers to use. At least 2 major IDEs (Eclipse and NetBeans) have pretty good integration to Maven already such that a pom.xml file already is the definition of an IDE project. I can tell any new developer that he can use whatever IDE he prefers as long as the build system itself is based on Maven.
4. I found that the development bootstrap process for picking up things midway was drastically cut down when I switched to Maven. New developers, even those unfamiliar with the project at hand, was able to at least compile, package and deploy within half hour of briefing them of the project. Support staff (who are typically not as technically adept) were able to concentrate on troubleshooting and not fret about building the project, which is an unnecessary irritation.

All in all, Maven suits my needs perfectly. I do agree to a certain extent that an independent developer who has his own workflow and project management practices may not derive much benefit from it, but none of us over here work in a void by ourselves.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1077477/why-do-so-few-people-use-maven-are-there-alternative-tools