Just adding some two cents on the other side. We do not use Maven for our internal production. We have exclusively private intranets for our development environments that do not have internet access. We have our own build mechanisms in place internally which function better than kludging an online tool to work exclusively offline.
Don't get me wrong, I think having Maven for the people who want and support it would be great, but it cannot be the only option. I do agree Ant can be a PITA sometimes just like any other scripted build / language. So keep maven for one option. Could we create an Air app that would be able to manage the other options? -Mark