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Maven tries to fight scripting logic abuse in Ant by hard-coding everything in a strict life-cycle, which is hard to customize. It still doesn't solve the problem though. There is a lot of room for plug-in abuse in Maven as well. But well behaved Maven scripts tend to be smaller than well behaved Ant scripts in general.

You do general flow control in Ant by using ant-contrib add-on. Ant becomes a Turing complete language with it.

For those who don't abuse the scripting language, don't abuse plug-ins and don't like XML, there is Gradle. Which is Turing complete like Ant + ant-contrib, have full support for Maven plug-ins and repositories, and uses Groovy/Java syntax instead of XML.

Ah, okay. Gradle sounds interesting. I always thought Ant would be better if I could just write a code to do everything it does, instead of using XML. As it would be easier to write and read (for me anyway).