since once again, dropping down to the Ant plugin is still generally how you do custom things in the Maven world. Not only does it benefit that community, but it also benefits Maven users as well.

It's great that the Ant developers continue to put their volunteer time and work into maintaining this important project, rather than letting it go moribund. and also believing that Gradle is the most ridiculously over-engineered project that the Java community has cooked up in years. However, I can understand some people wanting to eschew Maven's prescriptive lifecycle for various reasons. I favor Maven myself, since you can always drop down to its Ant plugin if you ever need to do something really custom. There also seems to be a small community that appreciates Ant for what it is, and does choose to use it for greenfield projects. However, there are thousands of legacy projects out there which will likely never migrate. Granted, Ant is basically 'legacy' software, and most people would not use it as the build system for a new greenfield project in 2015.

Apache ant 1.9.12